By Before Eddie Murphy was Donkey from Shrek, or Sherman Klump, or Dr Doolittle, the comedian was best known for his hilarious stand-up specials like Eddie Murphy Delirious. Though the puerile slapstick of his early noughts comedies like Norbit hasn't aged especially well, Murphy's gradual disappearance from entertainment has prompted questions of whether he'll eventually make a return to his comedy roots.
Earlier this year Murphy appeared in an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, discussing his career and the prospect of going back to doing stand-up.
While the jury is out on him that revisiting particular avenue, Netflix yesterday released the trailer for Dolemite Is My Name, a film starring Murphy as 1970's blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore. Moore was a comedian, singer and actor, best known for playing Dolemite in a series of 1970s films about a pimp with a penchant for telling obscene stories.
As per Netflix's official synopsis for the film:
Stung by a string of showbiz failures, floundering comedian Rudy Ray Moore (Academy Award nominee Eddie Murphy) has an epiphany that turns him into a word-of-mouth sensation: step onstage as someone else. Borrowing from the street mythology of 1970s Los Angeles, Moore assumes the persona of Dolemite, a pimp with a cane and an arsenal of obscene fables. However, his ambitions exceed selling bootleg records deemed too racy for mainstream radio stations to play.
Moore convinces a social justice-minded dramatist (Keegan-Michael Key) to write his alter ego a film, incorporating kung fu, car chases, and Lady Reed (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), an ex-backup singer who becomes his unexpected comedic foil. Despite clashing with his pretentious director, D’Urville Martin (Wesley Snipes), and countless production hurdles at their studio in the dilapidated Dunbar Hotel, Moore’s Dolemite becomes a runaway box office smash and a defining movie of the Blaxploitation era.
Murphy will bring Moore's Dolemite to a new generation, putting weight behind a potential resurgence of the genre. Aimed at black audiences during the 1970s, blaxploitation films were thriller, crime, action or horror films, such as Foxy Brown or Shaft, which had black leading actors and often featured anti-establishment plot-lines.
Though the genre was praised for increasing representation in cinema, it also suffered criticism for the recurring harmful stereotypes of African Americans.
Aside from being riffed on in the likes of Jackie Brown or Django Unchained, the genre has largely been deemed outdated in modern cinema, but may be creeping back into fashion. The last two years has seen the release of crime thriller Proud Mary with Taraji P. Henson, a remake of classic blaxploitation film Super Fly, the Samuel L. Jackson-fronted reboot of Shaft, and a Cleopatra Jones reboot is on the way too.
While Dolemite Is My Name is being billed as a blaxploitation film, it's really a blaxploitation film about blaxploitation films, using the genre from the inside to grapple with the ethics of it.
By exploring the man playing Dolemite, rather than rebooting the original franchise, the film is able to use Moore as a lens to explore the difficult experience of being a black actor in the Seventies.
It looks to be part of a general trend in black cinema, where films are subverting genres to Trojan horse important messages about race and discrimination to a wider audience. High profile recent examples include horror film Get Out, Spike Lee's comedy-drama BlacKkKlansman and absurdist sci-fi Sorry to Bother You.
In addition to the big name cast, which thankfully Eddie Murphy is only playing one character of, there's also impressive talent behind the camera, including costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who won an Academy Award for Black Panther, and scriptwriters with credits on The People v. O.J. Simpson.
Whether Dolemite Is My Name will kickstart Eddie Murphy's career remains to be seen, but it looks like his humour is finally being used for something more worthwhile than a nutty professor in a fat suit.
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