A Sign Of Things To Come For Murphy

Rating: Null/10 (26 January 2018)

Continuing my Plan to watch every Eddie Murphy movie in order, I come to Mulan (1998)
Plot In A Paragraph: To save her father from certain death in the army, Mulan, a young maiden, secretly goes in his place and becomes one of China's greatest heroines in the process.
To get in the mood, I watched this with my girlfriends daughter. This is a forgotten Disney movie. For whatever reason, most of Disney's releases in the 90's post Lion King have faded into obscurity. 20 years ahead of its time!! A brave heroine, funny, loyal animal sidekicks and the whole message here is standard feminist empowerment. Release the same movie today, and it would probably be amongst the highest grossers of the year.
Like Robin Williams in Aladdin Murphy is second billed as the the comedy sidekick. He is Muchu, a dragon so small, he is confused for a lizard. And like Williams, he is the only recognisable voice, and is the best thing in the movie. I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would, and I actually got chills at one point. I especially liked that it didn't follow the traditional Disney ending.
Murphy was hit by a scandal just before this movie's release, He was stopped by police for picking up a transvestite prostitute in a bad part of Hollywood. But that didn't effect the movie at all as Mulan was amongst the highest grossers of Murphy's career at that point. It was a sign of things to come for him.
Mulan Grossed $120 million at the domestic box office to end 1998 as the 13th highest grossing movie of the year.