In his last decent role - in Shrek - Eddie Murphy played a talking donkey. In his early forties, the star seems to be struggling for scripts to fit his mercurial bad-boy talent, and this very expensive space comedy won't do his seesaw career any favours.
Murphy plays Pluto, an ex-smuggler running a popular nightclub in a rundown colony on the moon. About to be made "the only place in the Universe where gambling is legal", it is now a magnet for mobsters who would like to take possession of Pluto's joint and turn it into a casino.
Murphy manages to make something likeable of this bon viveur and unreconstructed sexist who has programmed his French maid robot to keep dropping things so he can ogle her derriËre, and has given his vacantly beaming robot bodyguard (Randy Quaid) a happiness chip.
Anyone battered by the bombast of Steven Spielberg's recent sci-fi movies might, if they regard Pluto Nash as a breezily unpretentious B-flick, find it a guilty, regressive pleasure.
Pluto Nash
Cert: certPG
