| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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THE GOLDEN CHILD
Rating: 
USA. 1986.
Director – Michael Ritchie, Screenplay – Denis Feldman, Producers – Edward Feldman & Robert D. Wachs, Photography – Donald E. Thorin, Music – Michael Colombier, Visual Effects – Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisor – Ken Ralston), Special Effects Supervisor – Cliff Wenger, Makeup Effects – Ken Chase, Production Design – J. Michael Riva. Production Company – Feldman-Meeker Productions/Eddie Murphy Productions.
Cast:
Eddie Murphy (Chandler Jarrell), Charlotte Lewis (Kee Nang), Charles Dance (Sardo Numspa), Victor Wong (Ghampa), J.L. Reate (The Golden Child)
Plot: Chandler Jarrell, a social worker specializing in locating lost children, is contacted by a Tibetan woman Kee Nang who asks him to help locate the Golden Child. The Golden Child has amazing powers, including being able to return life to the dead simply with his touch. But the Child has been kidnapped by the evil Sardo Numspa and if Numspa can kill the Child then evil will rule supreme in the world. Prophecies have led Kee Nang to Chandler and say that he is the Chosen One who will rescue the Child. Chandler thinks she is crazy. But after encountering Numspa’s demonic forces, Chandler is reluctantly drawn into the struggle.
At the time that he made The Golden Child, Eddie Murphy was riding high on hits like 48 Hrs. (1982), Trading Places (1983) and the enormous success of Beverly Hills Cop (1984). The Golden Child was probably the nearest thing Murphy had to a flop at least up until the 1990s with works like Harlem Nights (1989), Boomerang (1992) and The Distinguished Gentleman (1992). It certainly didn’t lose money but the critical reception and audience opinion was universally inimical.
The Golden Child came out at the time when Hollywood suddenly discovered Asian fantasy cinema. Hong Kong filmmakers had created a uniquely original genre of their own a few years earlier with the bizarrely amazing Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain (1983) and other hits such as Mr Vampire (1985), where over-the-top martial arts moves were combined with elements of traditional Eastern myth and religion. 1986 suddenly became a year when Hollywood made their own attempts to import Wu Xia Pan with both The Golden Child and John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986). There’s much similarity between The Golden Child and Big Trouble in Little China – both have a story about a Westerner fighting Oriental demonic forces in human form (and not the least of which was that John Carpenter was initially approached to direct The Golden Child). Unfortunately neither film found a rave reception and Hollywood abandoned interest in Hong Kong fantastic cinema until the late 1990s and the massive successes of The Matrix (1999) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The Golden Child is clearly trying to imitate its Hong Kongese models without much idea of what it is doing – it offers up a few lame martial arts sequences conducted with no imagination – and makes the case eminently clear that the originals were light years ahead of the clumsy American attempts to copy them.
None of the things in The Golden Child really ever gel together – Eddie Murphy and the martial arts and elements of Asian fantasy; the romance between Murphy and Charlotte Lewis; Murphy cast as a social worker; the mixture of comedy and Wu Xia Pan. The problem is director Michael Ritchie. Ritchie made several fine films – Downhill Racer (1969), Prime Cut (1972), The Candidate (1972), Divine Madness (1980) – and commercial successes such as The Bad News Bears (1976), Semi-Tough (1977) and Fletch (1985). But Ritchie’s handful of ventures into fantastic cinema – the initially intriguing Peter Benchley lost island of pirates film The Island (1980), the fairy godmother film A Simple Wish (1997) and the adaptation of the musical The Fantasticks (2000) – were leaden disasters.
Unlike John Carpenter in Big Troublein Little China, Michael Ritchie’s greatest problem is not knowing how to handle the fantastic. The black magic side has a admirable ferocity – blood-filled bowls of wheatmeal, a room painted in bloody Oriental characters to restrain the Child – and there’s one delightful effects scene where the Child transforms a Coke can into a stop-motion animated tin soldier. But Ritchie never lets the action open up and swashbuckle as Carpenter did or as say a similar quest movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) does. The actual quest that Eddie Murphy must fulfil seems quite inconsequential – indeed he does so little that is actually heroic, other than throw about one-liners, that it seems a puzzle as to why he is named The Chosen One. Industrial Light and Magic’s optical and stop-motion effects are uncustomarily well below par.
But the film does have Eddie Murphy, which is its distinguishing advantage. He belongs in a fantasy film like this about as much as John Wayne does and there is the overriding sense that the script has been rewritten from its original conception as a star vehicle for him. But his seemingly off-the-cuff style of impromptu acting is rather funny – trying to bluff his way past a customs official, to him suggesting Charlotte Lewis should hide her scroll lest the local Rastafarians think it a joint, or accidentally bursting in on a backyard barbecue with a gun – “It’s alright, I just want a fry.” His female support, Charlotte Lewis, is utterly bland, but there’s wily support from Victor Wong, while the fine British actor Charles Dance proves that, if nothing else, he has a natty set of threads and menacing range of expressions.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2003
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