Remember when Eddie Murphy was funny?

 There was a time when Eddie was the definition of funny. He was the lone bright spot on Saturday Night Live for a period in the 80's, he gave us Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places, Coming to America and his classic stand up special, Raw. Eddie Murphy was on top of the world, and widely considered one of the most creative and funny young comedians in Hollywood.

Then, the last quarter century or so happened.

We've been treated to films like Pluto Nash, Metro, Holy Man, Daddy Day Care, Norbit, and most recently, A Thousand Words. This movie is so craptastic that Rotton Tomatoes gave it a 0% in its freshness scale. If you thought "Meet Dave" was rock bottom, you would have been wrong. 43 out of 43 critics thought it was garbage. Ouch.

You may ask yourself, how could this possibly have happened? To you, fair reader, I offer the greatest example of foreshadowing in modern history. Eddie's attempt at a music career with "Party All the Time"

I won't get into a full breakdown of the video, because I honestly couldn't do it justice. Talking about how bad the song is would not be interesting. What is interesting is everyone else in the video. Rick James is the obvious person to discuss first.

Throughout the video, Rick is heavily involved with the sound engineering as well as giving cues to Eddie. The man is doing everything he can to polish this turd. By the end of the song, he leaves the sound booth to go out and help sing the outro. He oddly also grabs his bass, yet there is no bass track. He was a known narcotics user, so we'll chalk this whole sequence up to a little too much of the "booger sugar". Props for actually trying to help his friend though. He knew the song was crap but tried to help Eddie make it at least marginally better.

The people to blame for this fiasco and every piece of crap movie Eddie Murphy has put out over the last 20 or so years are the group of roughly 10 people/enablers in the studio who are there to basically dance along and give Eddie the occasional thumbs-up signal. They could have helped Eddie by giving some constructive feedback but because they were either too afraid to say something or too dumb, they effectively dropped a brick on the gas pedal of Eddie's out of control career.

Moral of the story is that surrounding yourself with people like this is simply a bad idea. Hopefully someone, somewhere can have an honest adult conversation with Mr Murphy telling him it's not a good idea to take every movie they pitch to you. Perhaps they just need to sit him down and make him watch Beverly Hills Cop to see if he can even remember a time when he was funny. I truly hope he figures it out.

Drive slow