What film have you seen more times than any other? Could you even say for sure? I couldn’t, not for sure, but I can think of a few contenders: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Home Alone, Independence Day, A Christmas Story (only once a year, but for so many years), and this film.
But why this one? It isn’t a great film like Roger Rabbit or Christmas Story. It wasn’t a blockbuster like Independence Day or Home Alone. It was a moderate hit, not very well reviewed and not especially well remembered. But we got it on DVD years ago and I’ve gone back to it any number of times, to the point where I could re-enact whole scenes from memory, and was writing a nearly beat-for-beat description which would’ve made for an unwieldy review I might never have finished.
The point is, I’ve seen this film any number of times (25 at least, and certain scenes far more than that), and the question is: why? I’ll admit it’s not a great film, but it does have one aspect which makes it worth at least one viewing for any serious film buff, and which doubtless is a large part of what’s drawn me back so many times. And that’s Eddie Murphy.
I’ll say this unequivocally: Eddie Murphy gives one (or six) of the all-time great comedy performances here. The film itself is fine—it’s certainly amusing and decently crafted—but to praise it at all is to praise Murphy and the astounding makeup which allows him to play the better part of the Klump family. And those aspects I cannot praise highly enough.
The plot, in brief: after the events of The Nutty Professor, wherein shy, obese scientist Dr. Sherman Klump (Murphy) discovered a formula to transform him into Buddy Love (Murphy), a suave, skinny alter ego—who was also as brash and arrogant as Klump was sweet and thoughtful—Klump, despite winning out over Love at the end of the first film, is haunted by nightmares of Buddy disrupting his wedding to Dr. Denise Gaines (Janet Jackson), his current sweetheart. Worse, Klump is plagued by outbursts of Buddy’s crass, obnoxious personality—akin to demonic possession—which threaten to ruin his relationship with Denise for real.
After a disastrous attempted proposal, he rushes to his lab and literally extracts Love’s genetic code from his own DNA, leaving Buddy a cupful of aqueous goop in a flask. Assuming he’s free of Buddy for good, he proposes to Denise, and she accepts. But thanks to a freak mishap, the remnants of Buddy combine with a stray hair from Buster (an old basset hound Klump uses as a test subject), and allow him to take corporeal form.
Meanwhile, Klump and Gaines have created an elixir which causes temporary de-aging, and a pharmaceutical firm has offered their university $150 million for it—an offer which Buddy gets wind of after confronting Klump and Gaines at the movies. He later tears apart Klump’s home looking for the elixir, and Sherman decides to hide the sample at the home of his parents, Cletus (Murphy) and Anna Pearl (Murphy).
Things only get worse when Cletus, frustrated over his own impotence, impulsively tries the elixir, which leads Buddy to discover its location when he sees Cletus out on the town and inconveniently reverting to old age. And worse still, Sherman begins experiencing mental lapses and discovers that, in extracting Buddy, he set off a degenerative process in his own brain—and the only way to fix that is to get Buddy’s genetic material back in his system.
Much of the comedy in The Klumps is crude, crass, and in a few cases actively unfortunate (one instance in particular I’ll get to later on), but much of it works, and that’s because of Murphy, who invests the material not just with his comedic genius but with real heart and sincerity. Consider Sherman’s dorky sweetness, his devotion to Denise, his struggle to accept that someone could truly be in love with him and his equal struggle to accept that Buddy is a part of himself—a point made all too clear by the dementia he falls into after tearing Buddy from his DNA. It’s a delicate balancing act, but Murphy pulls it off beautifully, getting the laughs without losing the humanity of the character.
Just look at the botched-proposal scene, where he moves from sincere sweetness to obnoxious crassness and back again, finally launching into that dance (and uttering the great cryptic line “Put on the good ass!” before coming to his senses and being left devastated by what has happened:
Now compare this to the scene where Sherman appears to lose the last vestiges of his memory, barely getting out a last apology to Denise before lapsing into a childlike state:
It’s a scene which easily could’ve been merely mawkish or absurd, but Murphy makes it work by knowing when to hold back, when to push for effect and when to show restraint. But he doesn’t just pull this off for one character but for six, and I could spend hundreds, if not thousands of words going into the full scope of what he accomplishes here.
Buddy, of course, requires little makeup; he is a riff on Murphy’s established fast-talking, street-smart persona. But he is also part dog, which causes odd behavior on his part (and allows Sherman to devise a stratagem against him), which means that Murphy must not only play a heightened version of a character many already found overpowering, but must chase cats, stick his head out taxi windows, and play fetch. But he never betrays a hint of embarrassment or ego in any of this—Buddy is, of course, above caring what anyone else thinks of him and his actions, and on the rare occasion he’s properly called on them, he doesn’t give a damn: “What ‘Good God’?! I went on the paper!” (It makes (disgusting) sense in context.)
Then there’s Cletus (or “Clesius,” as the subtitles call him), who can be blustery when frustrated—especially when he and Ida go at it, or when Sherman devises a plan to save himself but doesn’t fully explain it to Cletus, leaving his father utterly baffled (“You just took the wrong off-ramp!”)—but most of the time he’s warmly paternal (well, as long as Ernie stays out of his chair) or sympathetically rendered, especially in his struggles with impotence. But then, after an especially humiliating comment from one of Anna’s friends, he decides to try Sherman’s youth formula (which Sherman is keeping at the Klump home so Buddy won’t find it), and that’s how we get…
…young Cletus. Not baby Cletus, not even teenage Cletus, just Cletus in his 40s or early 50s, considerably thinner and with darker hair, who breaks out his old leisure suit and goes to the club, where he’s flirted with and summarily beaten up by a shriveled old man (Sylvester Jenkins) before reverting to his old self. He takes the formula again in an attempt to impress Anna, but she is horrified and refuses to take it*, instead feeling like Cletus is “tired of the fat, old woman you got married to.” Murphy solidly adapts Cletus’ mannerisms to his reinvigorated State, especially his fundamental sheepishness (like his bashful reaction when he’s flirted with) and his bitter disappointment when Anna refuses to take the formula, making Cletus another three-dimensional characterization.
*I’ve always found this moment a bit odd; Anna rejects the formula (developed by her own son, whom she’s deeply proud of) as a “magic formula,” and Cletus merely asks her “What’s wrong with you, don’t you wanna be young?” rather than asking her to trust her son’s scientific genius.
But in many ways, I find Anna Pearl the most remarkable of Murphy’s performance. Not only is it a drag turn, but Anna is quite excitable and over-the-top, given to strange clapping cheers (“BILLY DEE, BILLY DEE, BILLY DEE!”) and anxious chattering and murmuring, like the great moment when she tries to drown out Ida’s lewd mutterings with her humming. But Murphy strikes the right balance throughout, and she is as warm and human as you could want, her moments of disappointment and heartbreak (which are many, given how deeply she feels) being truly poignant.
And she can move between pathos and hilarity with ease; look at the scene where she tries to arouse Cletus by wearing a hot pink gown and playing mood music, one moment frustrated by Cletus’ indifference (a mask for his own frustration), the next trying not to hear Ida and her boyfriend Isaac (Gabriel Williams) going at it upstairs; she may asset to the disgusted Cletus “My mama has a healthy libido,” but she’s clearly as sick of the noise as he is.
Which, of course, brings us to Ida Mae, who might represent the most complete transformation on Murphy’s part, as he’s not only playing a woman, but a very old and shriveled one, and one who’s hilariously unfiltered in word and deed; she doesn’t hesitate to discuss her love life, her hatred of Cletus (the feeling is mutual), and her lust for Buddy when their paths cross. It would’ve been easy for her to become a total stereotype, a crass cartoon mocked for the state of her body and the incongruity of her sexual appetite vis-à-vis her age—certainly Buddy doesn’t find her attentions welcome (and if you think about it, she’s kind of lusting after her own grandson, but let’s not dwell on that).
It doesn’t happen because Ida has no illusions about her age or the state of her body (at one point she relates a story about accidentally standing on her own breast). She doesn’t care. She’s alive and she’s going to get everything she can out of life while the getting is good, and Murphy perfectly depicts this. Likewise, while he embraces her mannerisms, her deliberate movements and her thick voice, he plays them with sincerity, such that we laugh with Ida, not at her. My mother was an admirer of hers, and I trust her judgment on this.
Lastly, there’s Ernie, who never really gets to be the focus of a scene and doesn’t have an arc of his own; he’s the working-class brother, long in Sherman’s shadow, who tends to make snarky comments on what’s going on (he calls Sherman “Joe College”), while bantering with his father and his teenage son Ernest Jr. (Jamal Mixon). But even if Ernie is given relatively little to do, Murphy makes him a decently well-rounded character, and he gets a few good lines, especially his reactions (“Now…was that supposed to happen?”).
The individual performances are all very good or great, but it’s the cumulative impact of them across the entire film which really speaks to the magnitude of Murphy’s achievement. The film itself pales next to it, unlike, say, Holy Motors, wherein Denis Lavant plays 11 roles (most nowhere near as emotionally complex as the roles Murphy plays here), but in so well-realized a context, so well directed and written, that he got something like the acclaim he deserved. Murphy, in an enjoyable but certainly not brilliant film, did not.
Given that he’s the overwhelming star of the show, one could easily overlook the supporting cast, but they aren’t bad. Jackson is appropriately warm and kind as Denise, and she handles her dramatic moments fairly well; she doesn’t actually get much to do from a comedic standpoint, but unlike a lot of such characters in similar films over the years, she does seem to be on the same planet as the Klumps, appreciating their eccentricities even if she doesn’t join in on them. Better still is Larry Miller as Dean Richmond, who’s no unequivocal fan of Sherman, and whose frustrations provide the film with its funniest moments that don’t center on Murphy (as well as one of its most unfortunate, but I’ll get to that). Everyone else—Ales, Williams, Mixon—is just kind of there. Most do fine with what they’re given to do, but even they don’t rise above their roles.
Some of that is probably on director Peter Segal, who does an adequate job at best and a flat, generic job at worst. Admittedly, working around Murphy’s multiple performances might not have left much room for directorial invention, but there are points where the direction lets the film down; many of the secondary actors are pretty badly directed, unable to do much more than react to Murphy’s antics. And there’s not much to the look of the film, even if cinematographer Dean Semler is an Oscar winner (for Dances with Wolves), nor is there much distinction in William Kerr’s editing.
But for the most part, they all do decently well, which is more than I can say for the special-effects team. Much of the CGI is actively weak; the first appearance of Buddy during the opening dream sequence is pretty fake-looking, but there’s a later scene involving Buddy which, despite being one of the most effects-driven scenes in the film and one which is actually vital to the story, looks no better than something out of Baby Geniuses. Other effects at least look okay (one sequence in particular which I’ll mention shortly), but for a film which cost $125 million adjusted for inflation, it’s shocking how hokey parts of The Klumps look.
The makeup, however, is an unqualified triumph throughout for Rick Baker and David LeRoy Anderson, who jointly won an Oscar for the first film (but weren’t so much as nominated here). I’m frankly less familiar with the first film, which I’ve seen maybe twice (and not been too taken with either time), but it seems like their work, especially for the rest of the Klump family (the first film focuses much more on Sherman) is much stronger here; it’s quite easy to forget that one actor is playing all these roles, and as much of that comes from Murphy’s performance, he couldn’t have pulled it off quite so brilliantly without Baker and Anderson.
He couldn’t have done without the script either, though he does much to elevate it, making moments which could’ve been silly, crass, or sappy genuinely funny and moving. And even he can’t make the plot much better developed, the youth formula much less of a plot device, or the rate of Sherman’s cerebral degeneration much less dependent on the needs of the plot. It’s not a great script, doing too little to fully develop its most promising theme—the idea that our negative qualities are as much a part of us as our positive ones, and that trying to deny them is destructive—though it comes through enough to be picked up on. Probably it says enough that there are four credited screenwriters: Barry W. Blaustein, David Sheffield, Paul Weitz, and his brother Chris. (Steve Oedekerk is credited with the story, along with Blaustein and Sheffield.) Much of the writing is more functional than inspired, and it’s Murphy’s performance that makes the lines land as well as they do.
He and Miller even do their best to sell the film’s most unfortunate scene, wherein Richmond is, shall we say, violated by a giant hamster—the hamster’s mutation itself pushing the film rather farther into the realm of fantasy than can be justified by anything else in it. But even if you allow that the hamster merely mistook Richmond for his mate (because Richmond, fleeing the giant hamster who’s firing shit-pellets from his rear end with enough force to throw people through doors—it’s pretty ridiculous—tried to conceal himself with a fur coat the color of the mate’s fur), it’s still a comedic depiction of sexual assault. It’s hard to defend on any level, especially now.
It’s the more unfortunate because, even if The Klumps is no great film, it has so many entertaining moments so well played by its star that I can go back to it time and again, and have. I could’ve filled this review simply with descriptions of those moments, because that’s how well I’ve come to know this movie. Maybe it just entered my life at the right time (my early-mid teens), because I really don’t know how I’d take it if I came to it for the first time now.
As such, I can’t unequivocally recommend it, because as a film it’s unquestionably flawed. But for Murphy’s performances, the makeup, and the undoubted streak of sincerity which helps us care about these characters as much as they care about themselves, I do recommend it. You can certainly do far, far worse.
Score: 72
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