The Nutty Professor (1996)

The Nutty Professor (1996)

6/10

Starring

Eddie Murphy

Jada Pinkett

James Coburn

Directed by Tom Shadyac

The Nutty Professor, the remake of a 1963 comedy movie of the same name. Here we have Eddie Murphy playing dual roles and just making the best of it. The movie had Murphy at his best getting himself to play the main character and also some of the supporting cast.

The fun in the movie is him and the humor he brought to the roles he played. You can see many loose stings in this plot, but this is a slapstick comedy so it is expected, but what I did not expect was to like this movie as much as I did.

The movie is a parody of Robert Louis Stevenson's book Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. They took the main theme of a man who takes a portion to be someone else, and drops everything else from Stevenson's book.

Here in this movie we have Professor Klump who is our Dr. Jekyll. Klump is obese to the next level, he is also nice and kind. He struggles to fit in everywhere and all he wants is to find a way to lose weight and be like everyone else. What he views as normal.

He has a running experiment on hamsters to see if he can get a fat one to lose weight and when he saw signs of progress, Klump tuned up the formula to work on a human. Without letting any of his lab assistants know, Klump alone in the lab at night drank the formula and changed to a skinny man, Buddy love this is Klump’s Mr Hyde.

Buddy is full of energy and life, he is confident and able to do and say things which Klump could not. The problem starts as usual with a lady, Klump loves her and hopes Buddy will be able to woe her, but Buddy is a loose canon and things did not go as plan.

How the two get to resolve this issue and which part will eventually dominate is what this movie is about.

Worth noting is that unlike Stevenson's book where it is clear that Jekyll is fully aware of what Hyde has done when the change has occurred and vice-versa. In the movie it is not so clear.

In the book the change brings forth a different perception of life which makes one (for example Hyde) do things which may affect the other (Jekyll), the other is aware of what is being done but is powerless to do anything.

Buddy and Klump seem to be independent of one another and is unaware of what the other would have done. A plot hole exist here, because there was a time which it seem Klump knew what happened when he was Buddy (there was an incident in the restaurant which Klump recalled happened to Buddy and apologized for). Then there was an incident which Buddy tricked Klump, which could have only happened if Klump did not know the things Buddy did.

In the end the movie was a commercial success which led to a second part, which was not as good and is not worth remembering.