Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Sun 16 August 2026 21:15, UK
One of the best reactions from an audience in a cinema that I’ve witnessed recently was for a film that won’t even be released for another year, Shrek 5, and really, there was one driving reason for that excitement during the trailer: Eddie Murphy.
Because much as people love Shrek, and Mike Myers’ bizarre appropriation of whatever Scottish dialogue he’s attempting, and much as they love that whole day-glo swamp world and far, far, away, it’s obviously Donkey that makes the movies as good as they are.
Even Myers himself has described Murphy’s performance in the four films to this point as ‘a masterpiece’, and while those movies are a bit up and down in quality to say the least, pretty much all of the best moments involve his magnificently irritating mule and his seemingly endless quest to wind up his big green buddy as much as possible.
Murphy had some practice in doing the voice a few years earlier, thanks to his work as a small dragon in the Disney animation Mulan, but there’s no doubt that Shrek represented a career revival for the comic legend who was starting to get a reputation for making mostly terrible movies by the end of the millennium.
It was a bit sad to witness a man who had been so explosively, brilliantly talented as a groundbreaking comic and movie star throughout the 1980s, reduced to making films like Dr Doolittle and Vampire in Brooklyn, and although people still flocked to watch 1996’s The Nutty Professor, you were still aware that this was someone operating well within his possibilities.
And that was something that Murphy himself was aware of after his astonishing success going from stand-up to a string of box office hits like 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places and Coming to America. He decided he needed to transition from the persona and characters the public was expecting, and so he made something slightly different in 1992. Boomerang was a rom-com that saw Murphy move away from the wisecracking troublemaker to a slick, womanising business hotshot who learns his lesson when he comes up against a female boss who treats people just as badly as he does.
Murphy explained his thinking behind doing the movie at the time, saying, “I was anxious to do something different. Because all I had been doing was the same old thing, this fast-talking guy with a gun in his hand. Playing the rebel, that’s like an ingredient. It’s Eddie Murphy being entertaining, and that’s not the only way Eddie Murphy can be entertaining. You grow out of that, you go onto something else, and in film you can try anything.”
Talking in the third person aside, it showed that despite the adoration and the tens of millions sitting in his bank account, Murphy wanted to move on and get better as an artist, and to some degree, it seemed like the public would go with him. Boomerang made almost $100million at the box office, and critics were reasonably kind.
But it didn’t spark a new era of success for Murphy, and it was two years before he would have another hit movie. When it came, it was back in the familiar guise of Axel Foley for Beverly Hill Cop III, although it was panned by the press, and he wouldn’t make another one for another 30 years, with the Netflix-backed Beverly Hill Cop: Axel F.
