Tarnished Script Mars Murphy Luster in ‘The Golden Child’

High in the wind-lashed mountains of Tibet--distant, inaccessible--sits the Golden Child. Many believe he is the true, perfect soul that humanity has been awaiting for a thousand years. But lurking around him are Evil Forces: Heinous killers. Slavering brutes. Vile demons surging up from the deepest bowels of hell. Can the tot survive?

Oh, sure.

And deep in the more accessible shadows of your local moviehouse lies “The Golden Child” (citywide), which many believed would be the true, perfectly outrageous Eddie Murphy comedy we’ve been awaiting since 1985. Lurking around it are forces just as evil: Heinous scripting. Slavering special effects. Vile cliches surging up from the deepest bowels of Hollywood. Can it survive?

Nope.

The law of averages seems to have set in with a vengeance. After three smashingly successful outings--”48 HRS.,” “Trading Places” and “Beverly Hills Cop”--star Eddie Murphy’s latest is a flabby disappointment. The jokes die, the action curdles. Much of it falls as flat as smashed tinsel.

In the movie, Murphy plays Chan Jarrell, a Los Angeles social worker improbably selected as the Chosen One: the brave spirit who will wrest the Child (played by a winningly grave 7-year-old, J. L. Reate) from Satanic Forces. Not only is Jarrell’s destiny improbable. So are his street-fighting skills and universal chutzpah against overwhelming odds. They all seem left over from Murphy’s previous roles as crook, con man or vacationing cop.

No matter. In short order, he’s whisked off to Tibet, the Great Beyond, then back to Los Angeles. There, he battles assorted demons, bad dreams, Ray Harryhausen-style monsters and the sexual resistance of leading lady Charlotte Lewis (as the inscrutable kung fu princess Kee Nang). All, predictably, succumb.

Murphy dominates the movie; maybe that’s part of the problem. Like Robin Williams or Steve Martin, he’s one of today’s great verbal comics. It’s his murderous fluency that sets him apart--those Groucho Marxian, split-second word cadenzas he spits out, the sheer density and whiplash pace of his poker-faced badinage. But, like Groucho, he needs people to play off, to bewilder or outrage. Previously, he was surrounded by buddies or foils. Here, really, he has no one. The fetching Lewis hardly qualifies as a straight man, and the film only comes alive (almost) in Murphy’s few brief scenes with Victor Wong as the otherworldly, foul-mouthed Old Man of the Orient.

Otherwise, it’s a meandering mass of lame gags and overblown action. If Chan hoodwinks the Nepalese airport security, his charade lasts too long and loud. If he parries with the patrician devil, Sardo (Charles Dance), the barbs are meat-ax broad. Everything seems borrowed, dulled. There were probably more laughs, more on-target jokes, more sheer exhilaration and entertainment in the first 10 minutes of “Beverly Hills Cop” than in the whole gaudy, limping 1 1/2 hours here.

Why? Murphy’s skills--the impudent swagger, lightning quips and chameleon-like mimicry--all seem intact. And director Michael Ritchie, who’s shown a flair for action, deadpan humor and satire, should be good with material--and a star--like this.

But the story fails them both. Beginning in what seems to be the anteroom of the Temple of Doom, and segueing into an under-the-credits L.A. street montage (the only really clever sequence), it immediately nose-dives into coy shtick, and so much cornball karate you wonder if the movie makers are trying to run Run Run Shaw out of business. When Murphy, or anyone else, needs lines to play with, the script is never there. The dialogue has a hollow, arch ring, like desultory verbal doodling.

There’s too much self- or star consciousness in the handling of Murphy here. The heart of his appeal lies in his breezy smashing of icons and pomposity. People like to see him--a blue-jeaned interloper, full of brash vigor--colliding against convention and deflating gasbags. If he turns into an icon himself (as in the intercutting of Murphy with a Hollywood mural of Dean and Monroe), then he loses ground. His whole outsider’s hipster edge gets blunted and the jokes wither. Straight-out, self-indulgent star vehicles can be dangerous, and “The Golden Child” (PG-13) shows why. You can’t crash institutions against institutions without hearing a colossal groan, like galleons in port smashing hulls and sinking.