There is just something about the tilt of his head that seems entirely appropriate for a man who is following a sacred parakeet. Murphy is exactly right in that moment, but then he is exactly right all through this movie, which is utterly ridiculous and jolly good fun.
The advance rumors about "The Golden Child" were not encouraging.
I heard Paramount feared it had a bomb on its hands, but what were they worried about? The preview audience laughed all through the movie. No wonder, because this film - insignificant and lightweight and monumentally silly - is entertaining from beginning to end. Although it contains the usual scatological language, the sex and violence are mild.
Murphy plays the hero, a professional searcher for lost children.
After agents from hell kidnap a holy child from Tibet, Murphy is recruited to recover the child, find a magic dagger, defeat Satan's henchmen, beat up some Hell's Angels, pass several death-defying trials by fire, follow the sacred parakeet and fall in love with the beautiful heroine, who must first be brought back from the dead.
The movie's opening shots should have had a subtitle flashing Raiders Ripoff! Hollywood must have a whole industry supplying temples and gongs to the spawn of Indiana Jones. But from the moment Murphy appears on the screen, he makes the movie all his own; the special effects are basically just comic props. Murphy slides through the picture with easy wisecracks and unflappable cool, like a hip Bob Hope.
A lot of the time, he seems to improvise his smart aleck one-liners - I haven't seen the script, so I can't say for sure. What's amazing is that his dialogue always seems to fit. A lot of stand-up comedians throw off the pacing in a movie by going for improv at the wrong moments (Robin Williams is sometimes an example). Murphy usually seems to have the perfect reaction, even when he's shocked to catch a wise old seer picking his nose. Maybe the director, Michael Ritchie, deserves some of the credit for that; he let Williams wreck his "The Survivors" with inappropriate one-liners, but this time everything flows.
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