Every Eddie Murphy Movie, Ranked
Updated January 2023 to add You People.
After a successful stand-up career in the 1970s and a wildly acclaimed run on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s, Eddie Murphy launched his film career (while still on SNL) in 1982 and has been appearing on the big screen fairly steadily in the decades since, starring in over 40 titles. To date, Murphy's films have grossed over $6 billion worldwide, but only occasionally has the material on screen matched Murphy's comedic talents—and, even when it has, reviews have sometimes been less positive than you might expect. In the gallery above, we rank all of his films to date (including his newest, Coming 2 America) from worst to best by Metascore, which reflects the consensus of professional critics for each film.
The feature film directorial debut for black-ish creator Kenya Barris (from a script that he co-wrote with star Jonah Hill), this 2023 Netflix culture-clash rom-com finds Hill and Lauren London as a new couple who must navigate their tricky family relationships. Julia Louis Dreyfus and David Duchovny play his parents, while Eddie Murphy and Nia Long are hers. Murphy is one of the film's clear highlights for critics, but they also feel that he and the other talented actors are let down by a mediocre script. (And we aren't just paraphrasing; that word "mediocre" is used in quite a few of the reviews.)
“Murphy and Hill do lift the film often, the former being wryly sarcastic and meanspirited but cool, the latter finding much comedy in being overly vulnerable, earnest, and painfully sincere. But otherwise, this comedy has no safe spaces for anything resembling authentic human behavior, the kind that anchors comedy to feature truths that make laughs all the more lacerating.” —Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist
| Stream On |
|