12:42PM, Oct 23, 2008
Shrek stalwarts Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy are both looking like a Donkey’s rear-end this summer with comedies that forget to be funny.
Riffing on well-worn shtick, The Love Guru and Meet Dave prove some stars should change the record...
Stars that shine twice as bright burn half as long, and with the Austin Powers movies drawing over $470m at the US box office alone Mike Myers has shone very brightly indeed.
Eddie Murphy too has raked in the greenbacks with some bafflingly popular films – Daddy Day Camp attracted over a $100m in the US and Norbit did a tidy $95m.
But, The Love Guru and Meet Dave’s box office failures ($32m after five weeks and $11m after three weeks respectively) have put the future mega-paycheques of both stars in doubt.
Mike and Eddie are not the first stars to see their audiences fade. Look at any Hollywood star returning to former glories and there is usually a string of flops behind them.Sylvester Stallone ended a run of box office bombs (Driven) and straight-to-DVD dross (Get Carter) when he resurrected Rocky and Rambo and Harrison Ford clearly felt too much time had passed since his last bona fide hit, What Lies Beneath, when he pushed for Indy to be brought out of retirement.
Not that this is anything new. Roger Moore required a stuntman to do his running in A View To A Kill and still needed pushing out the door rather than retire his license to kill gracefully, and George Lucas is a sobering lesson in milking a formula until the cows come home screaming with bleeding udders.
Yes, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been a smash, but Harrison Ford’s biggest career error was not taking the Michael Douglas role in Traffic, a part that would have put him back on the path to becoming a fantastic character actor first trod in Witness and The Mosquito Coast... although the upcoming Crossing Over where he portrays a border patrol guard sounds promising.Granted this does not work for everyone – Sly was a revelation as an overweight, partially deaf hick sheriff in Copland, but crowds didn’t flock to check out his efforts, and Eddie Murphy seems to have taken his Dreamgirls Oscar snub as a sign never to stretch himself again.
These guys should take a look at Clint Eastwood, whose career resuscitating movies Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire placed the filter of old age on The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry, winning him other classy, mature movies with strong box office staying power.
And Jack Nicholson proves with every new movie that judicious use of an established persona can stay fresh.
Spare a thought for the ladies as well – Sharon Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer and Sandra Bullock’s box office charms have faded and they have no tried and tested franchise to fall back on (see Basic Instinct 2 and Speed 2 for details).
Of the fresh breed of movie stars, Brendan Fraser’s return to the tiresome Mummy series is offset by the surprisingly enjoyable Indy-esque romp Journey to the Center of the Earth (3D!), while Will Ferrel should look at The Love Guru’s poor performance as an omen of his own career.But, if stars do lose their silver screen lustre the big hits are now on the small screen, with 24, The Shield, The Wire and Battlestar Galactica resembling big budget movies and using the wide canvas of 12(ish) episode seasons for ambitious and thrilling storytelling.
Meanwhile, family friendly CGI works if they fancy a sure-fire hit to balance their live-action fortunes. Or do an Arnie and follow-up a returning to the well film (Terminator 3) with a move into politics.
As for Mike and Eddie? Well, Eddie continues to avoid the Dreamgirls route with the high-concept comedies NowhereLand (stressed ad-man dives into his daughter’s fantasy word) and A Thousand Words (a man discovers he has only another 1,000 words to say before dying) and both he and Myers have remakes on the horizon (The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty).
If the next movies from the pair perform anything like Dave and Guru, they're going to need the Shrek 4 animators to start drawing really fast.
Rob Daniel
Rob Daniel
