Rudy Ray Moore was a bad motherfucker. Not Shaft bad, but bad. You don’t have to shut
your mouth about it either. Rudy would want you to say it. He’d want you to
shout it. He wanted to be a star and set
out, by sheer force of will, to become one.
He wasn’t at all concerned about which field he achieved stardom in,
just so long as he did achieve it. He tried his hand as a singer, dancer,
stand-up comic, producer, and actor. His magnum opus, Dolemite, is the thing that
made him, if not a household name, famous.
It’s easy to see why Eddie Murphy would be drawn to the
story of Rudy Ray Moore. Murphy also made the journey from stand-up to action
star. To be fair, Murphy’s stardom was on a much grander scale. In Dolemite
is My Name Murphy puts on some very wide lapels to inhabit Moore.
DiMN is a biopic (the
most Oscar-bait of all the Oscar-bait categories there are), but it’s a
different sort of biopic. It’s an R-rated comedy, which certainly feels like it
belongs in Murphy’s wheelhouse. It also, strangely, has no actual villain. This is the tale of how Rudy Ray Moore believed
in himself, and a lot of other people believed in him, and some people tried to
help him even if they didn’t believe, and a few corporate types didn’t believe
in him and didn’t want to help him but also didn’t try to stop him either. There’s no heavy in that story.
DiMN doesn’t seem to care that it doesn’t have a bad guy.
The audience shouldn’t care either.
This movie is being called a comeback for Eddie Murphy. That
seems fair. He hasn’t made a film in three years, and for a decade before that
he was paychecking most of the time. This project seems like something he
actually cares about. You can see that on the screen. Eddie Murphy is a bad motherfucker too.
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