Imagine this: A special-effects industry getting ever more sophisticated. A Film of the Year (Avatar, natch) that’s essentially animated yet looks indistinguishable from live-action films with flesh-and-blood characters. A recent children’s film (Inkheart) where storybook characters turned out to be real. Another recent children’s film (Bedtime Stories) where bedtime stories turned out to be real. And now Imagine That, yet another children’s film where a young girl’s imaginary friends turn out to be real – and not just real, but able to provide much sounder investment advice than that of her dad, a financial consultant. Reality as we know it (or think we know it) is fast becoming an endangered species.
No surprise to find Eddie Murphy as beleaguered Dad; for a long time now, Murphy’s been the king of kidpics that pander shamelessly to kids and implicitly berate parents for being grown-ups. As the opening voice-over makes clear, the film’s true agenda is to “rescue” Dad from his life as an unhappy workaholic who never has time for his daughter (appealing newcomer Yara Shahidi) – and it’s also part of that cringe-making agenda that being a good parent means adapting your world (your reality, shall we say) to your kids’ world. Loss of dignity is par for the course, whether playing dress-up with little girls or talking to ‘imaginary’ princesses named Moppeta and Soppeta in the middle of a busy street.
At that stage, of course, Murphy’s only doing it for career reasons – because Moppeta and Soppeta somehow have inside information on which companies are getting “married” and which ones have poopy pants, which he then passes on (suitably decoded) to his grateful clients. Imagine That was written by Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, the team behind the Bill and Ted movies, and you do sometimes sense an irreverent satire behind the bland family comedy – especially in the corporate scenes, pitting Murphy against a Native American antagonist named Johnny Whitefeather (a hilarious Thomas Haden Church) who plays the Red Injun card for all it’s worth and often comes up with wise (if cryptic) pronouncements. He even talks to horses, taking his leave of one equine friend with a solemn “Be well”.
This is all good stuff, and if Imagine That had merely played out its familiar plot tightly and competently – it ends, needless to say, at the school concert, predicated on the burning question ‘Will Daddy get there in time to watch little Yara sing her solo?’ – it might’ve warranted the praise it’s getting as Murphy’s best family film in years. (I seem to be alone in thinking Meet Dave was funny.) Alas, not only is the film overlong at 107 minutes but it gets progressively weaker and more annoying. There are horrid Beatles covers – ‘Nowhere Man’ played over Eddie sitting slumped at his computer comes close to sacrilege – shameless energy-drink product placement (though I did chuckle slightly at the sight of a 10-year-old boy hopped up on Red Bull) and really awful plotting at the climax: the way Mr. Whitefeather self-destructs is neither clever nor convincing, in fact it’s offensively lazy. I miss the days of better Murphy vehicles like Trading Places, which worked hard for its happy ending – but I guess neither kids nor their long-suffering parents care too much about having their intelligence insulted.
Imagine That isn’t much of a film, but it has compensations. Murphy has a strong rapport with his onscreen daughter, sings a song to appease a dragon and asks a fairy princess about magnesium futures. The climax, with both financial hot-shots turning to their kids for advice, is slyly satirical (especially now, with Wall Street so discredited), though a Hollywood kidpic really has no business rebuking its characters for exploiting children. It’s almost at the two-star ‘Watchable’ rating – most of it is indeed quite watchable – but the script is so lazy and the overall agenda so rancid, I can’t help coming down to one star. Sorry, Eddie; just keeping it real.
