Eddie Murphy Says This Is His Worst Movie

Eddie Murphy is a king of movie comedy, but he’s sure made some notorious bombs. That list is embarrassingly long — Holy Man, Norbit, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Meet Dave, Imagine That and A Thousand Words are hard-to-defend failures, both as comedies and at the box office. However, none of those flops qualify as Murphy’s worst ever, at least according to Murphy.

In fact, Murphy made what he considers his worst movie during the hottest streak of his career, sandwiched between 48 Hours, Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop, according to Far Out. It’s hard to blame Murphy for the failure. When you’re in your early 20s and people throw obscene amounts of money at you, you take it and run. That’s what happened in the case of the Dudley Moore comedy Best Defense.

Murphy copped to the money grab when he returned to host Saturday Night Live a year after he’d left the show for good. “I did 48 Hours and Trading Places and I felt like a real actor,” he said during his monologue about the glut of offers that came next. “All of these scripts started coming from everywhere and I picked up a script called Best Defense. There’s a movie that sucked real bad.”

“At first I wasn’t going to do it because I felt like I was an actor but the money they gave me to do it, y’all would have done Best Defense too,” Murphy confessed to America. “I read the script at first, and the script was terrible. I was like, ‘What? How dare you give me a script like this! Oh, that much money? Let’s go!’”

Murphy’s character barely interacted with Moore or any of the main cast in Best Defense, a comedy that he said “turned out to be the worst movie ever done in the history of anything.” Best Defense cooled off his career so much, Murphy joked, that he called the producers of Saturday Night Live and asked if he could have his dressing room back. 

Best Defense and Murphy were doomed from the start considering his character wasn’t even in the original script. Producers pasted in a last-minute part for Murphy to cash in on his Trading Places popularity. Surprise, surprise — it didn’t work. 

Whether or not Best Defense is Murphy’s actual worst is up for debate. But most critics agreed with his assessment that the movie sucks real bad. “It really isn't easy to make a movie as mind-bendingly bad as Best Defense,” wrote Vincent Canby in his half-star New York Times review. “It takes hard work, a very great deal of money and people so talented that it matters when they fail with such utter lack of distinction.”