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Two things to remember. One: Murphy may have wrangled with his employers at Paramount Pictures, feeling they undervalued him and failed to scour the town for the most suitable projects, but people never stopped going to his films. Harlem Nights earned a respectable $60 million at the North American box office; Another 48 HRS., $80 million. Two: he hasn't lost his potential. "There are only a few others -- Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin -- in Eddie's league as a brilliant comic talent," says Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Disney sachem who worked with the young Eddie at Paramount and is shepherding Murphy's next film, Distinguished Gentlemen, at Disney. "Just as important, he's realigned his management team and has a great relationship with Brandon Tartikoff at Paramount. He's an ambitious, nailed-down, determined actor who has a big agenda of things he wants to get done."
First on the list is Boomerang, a bright comedy about a wealthy ad executive -- his Manhattan apartment isn't a duplex, it's a googolplex -- who discovers what it's like to be on the used end of a romance. Murphy, Hudlin (House Party) and scenarists Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield (who wrote many of Murphy's SNL bits, plus Coming to America) were inspired by Annie Hall (which Murphy has seen five times) and by the screwball love stories of '30s Hollywood. So the movie offers an Eddie role reversal: the famous ladies' man is a demure love slave to Robin Givens' sexually dominating boss. Like a smitten girl, he sits by the phone, head to it, waiting for it to ring. He's miffed when she's late for a date. After sex, he says, "You make me feel dirty" and "I'm calling my mother." It makes for good comedy -- and clever career rehab.
Boomerang also establishes Eddie as the charming center, almost the host, of a cast of genial zanies. They get most of the laughs. The criminally adorable Halle Berry provides the movie's heart. And Murphy is the stage manager, smiling his approval. In one pretty scene a lively child named Khandra Mkhize gives a little speech, with wide eyes and beautifully broad gestures, and Eddie mimics her, gesture for gesture, charm for charm. This is what he has always been: not just the performer but the audience too. He's us, with a little comic genius on the side.
And he is still black, but not too black; Sheffield calls this upscale homeboy movie Boyz in the Boardroom. Murphy says he's not a political creature, but these days everything is political. To stand in the middle of the mainstream, without being washed away by more violent social currents, is a bold stand in itself. So Eddie wants to please everyone. He's done it before. And on the evidence of this ingratiating comic fantasy, he's boomeranging back.