The Golden Child (1986)

**1/2

Where to Watch: Prime (rental); Google Play (rental)

Approaching forty as I am, I've started to succumb to the temptation of nostalgia. So I thought it might be a good idea to revisit a film I have fond memories of watching as a child. Now, I am not one of those people who has an inflated opinion of their tastes as a child. I saw Battlefield Earth in theatres. I thought it was totally awesome and rented it several times when it came out on VHS. I'm pretty sure if you had asked me when I was 10 what the funniest movie ever made was I would have said In The Army Now. 

The Golden Child is a movie I watched one hot Brisbane night in 1995 while suffering from a bout of gastroenteritis. I remember thinking it was both pretty cool and fucking weird. I also remember getting kind of confused by the end and possibly falling asleep. As it turns out, my impression of the film on rewatching it falls pretty much in line with my first, except that I would downgrade "pretty cool" to "kind of cool" and add a "very" to the "fucking weird". Also, full disclosure, I had had quite a few drinks by the time I put it on. So I can't really recommend it unless you have a spare couple of bucks and you're in the mood for what may well be the strangest hit movie of the 1980s. 

Just how strange? Well, this is an Eddie Murphy vehicle that wants to be an action film, a comedy, a horror movie, and a quasi-mystical fantasy film all at once. The tone is consequently very uneven - one minute you have Murphy doing his charming 80s goofball bit, and the next he's poking around in a bowl of oatmeal mixed with a teenage runaway's blood. It's all over the place.

Things open with a kid in a temple in a remote part of Tibet being annointed as the Golden Child - some sort of vaguely Dalai Lama-ish figure who is reincarnated even few millenia and charged with somehow improving the world, or at the very least stopping it from getting any worse. The kid's just finished resurrecting a bird (over the course of the film the Golden Child is shown to have all sorts of neat powers, ranging from astral projection to telekinesis to the ability to turn evil people good by touching them), when suddenly Charles Dance bursts into the temple accompanied by some goons, kills all the priests, and spirits the kid away in some weird cage. Now, this movie was both made and set in the mid-80s. I'm no expert on Tibet, but I find it hard to believe this temple could exist given the oppression to Chinese government was and continues to be engaging in there. Then there's the fact that the bad guys are all armed with mediaeval weaponry and dressed like rejects from Salute of the Jugger. So this movie pretty firmly establishes itself from the beginning as not giving a fuck about logic of any kind. It's kind of handy, really - if your suspension of disbelief can't carry you through the first five minutes of the film, you're probably better off not bothering with The Golden Child.

The action shifts to LA. Eddie Murphy plays a social worker specialising in locating missing children. A woman charged with locating the Golden Child, who it is believed is now in LA, sees Murphy on TV and reaches out to him. Murphy of course thinks she's full of shit, especially when she insists he's the Chosen One destined to rescue the kid, until the case he's working turns out to be connected to the capture and imprisonment of the Golden Child. From this point on the film is basically just a succession of weird incidents. First, Murphy tries to track down the child. Then Charles Dance decides to swap the kid for some magic knife that is apparently the only thing that can kill said child. So Murphy goes to Nepal (notably, not Tibet), goes through some weird obstacle course meant to show that he's both clever and pure of heart, gets the knife, and goes back to LA. Of course it's a trick, a time element is introduced, a really very impressive stop-motion demon is involved, and then everything ends for the best. If not for the film's commitment to deranged imagery and situations, there wouldn't be a great deal to distinguish it from any other crappy 80s blockbuster.

It's those deranged images and incidents that make the film kind of work, though. The plot is really just a frame on which to hang strange episodes and allow Murphy to do some pretty solid bits of shtick. And really, watching Eddie Murphy riff his way through surreal situation after surreal situation is pretty enjoyable. This movie shouldn't work, and I think by the end it really doesn't work, but Murphy is great throughout. 

Apart from Murphy, the special effects are another reason to watch The Golden Child. If you're a fan of stop motion, this film has some of the best I've ever seen. Charles Dance's transformation into a frankly awesome demon is the big attention getter, but there's also a very peculiar and enjoyable scene where the Golden Child uses his telekinesis to transform a can of Pepsi into a dancing doll. It's obvious product placement, and having an 80s-ified version of "Putting On The Ritz" play on the soundtrack is a bit on the nose, but it's still pretty neat. 

Probably the most noteworthy thing about this film, though, is the casting. I don't know if it was written as such, but this is a mega-budget movie from the mid-80s with a Black hero and an Asian heroine. That's both pretty uncommon and pretty neat, and it's kind of encouraging that the film was such a big hit, even if it's largely been forgotten. It even goes some way towards making up for the uncritical Orientalism that is practically The Golden Child's raison d'etre. 

So, I don't know that I'd recommend this film, but it can be a diverting experience if you're in the right mood, and if you're a fan of Eddie Murphy's early work then it's fun to see him in such a peculiar vehicle. Also Victor Wong is in it, swearing his head off, and that's pretty great.