Comedian Eddie Murphy stars in the family friendly film, “Imagine That,” just in time for an early Father’s Day outing.
Comedian Eddie Murphy stars in the family friendly film, “Imagine That,” just in time for an early Father’s Day outing.
Evan (played by Eddie Murphy) is a workaholic who is having trouble learning how to be a father. He admits that he didn’t know he’d be so bad at being a father and tends to heavily involve himself at work. When his ex-wife, Trish (played by Nicole Ari-Parker), asked him to spend time with his daughter, he instead tried his best to keep her quiet so he could finish a report. Fatherhood was becoming a nuisance for Evan, but he found out his daughter had a secret.
Evan’s daughter, Olivia (played by Yara Shahidi), carried around a blanket about as much as comic strip character Linus from “Peanuts.” And with her blanket came three imaginary friends, who somehow were gifted at telling Evan what companies to invest in. Evan humored his daughter once and went to a sales meeting with Olivia’s imaginary friends’ results and realized they were on to something.
When Evan was previously saying, “Cupida is stupida” to Olivia about one of her imaginary friends, these ladies weren’t stupid anymore. Now they were helping Evan’s career. Of course with the success of Olivia’s imaginary friends and his infatuation with how Olivia was able to consistently tell Evan what companies to invest in, he became obsessed. His friends like John Strother (played by DeRay Davis) started to notice how odd he’d become, especially when Evan crashed a birthday party to get ahold of the blanket and find out what Olivia’s imaginary friends are saying in regards to a big client.
Evan has to eventually choose between work and fatherhood.
It was satisfying to see an African-American father with his daughter onscreen, especially with the lack of Black fathers on television and in movie roles. But while “Imagine That” had a great theme about the wonders of fatherhood and comedic parts that only a father would do to entertain and appease his daughter, I didn’t laugh once through the entire comedic film. However, other audience members cracked up at the juvenile jokes like Evan putting glitter on his tie and doing the waltz on a stage or talking to a window as though it was an imaginary friend. But “Imagine That” tried way too hard to be funny and many times fell painfully flat.
Every scene with the rival business partner, Johnny Whitefeather (played by Thomas Haden Church), were long, drawn out and not remotely amusing. To top it off, he kept faking like he was Native American when it was later revealed that he was really Finnish Armenian. But he kept trying to trick his co-workers into believing that he had all these Native American secrets as to how the company could improve.
The break-in scene was highly unlikely even for a comedy and left me with my eyes rolling around waiting for the movie to be over. It’s a positive movie and sufficient for a family outing, but I’d give it 1 out of 5 stars.
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