Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer, 2019)

Eddie Murphy in entertaining film shocker! After appearing mostly in unbearable turds for nearly 30 years, with only the secure relative anonymity of voiceovers for animations, a still blindly-devoted and undemanding fanbase and the occasional brief respite from the dross such as his supporting role in Dreamgirls to keep his career going, Murphy takes centre stage in a biopic of an oddball and actually makes it work quite spectacularly.
Blaxploitation filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore's zero-budget output may not have been quite as awful as Ed Wood's, saved largely by a tongue kept constantly in the cheek, but quality cinema it was not and owed a lrge amount of its phenomenal popularity in the '70s to its utter, devil-may-care amateurishness. Naturally, this is what My Name is Dolemite mines for rich comic effect as the indefatigable motor-mouthed comedian Moore decides that he deserves a slice of the hollywood pie after several false starts with other enterprises. The caricaturish period patter is fast, the 'fuck'-count would put Tarantino to shame and there are many bumbling setbacks along the way to inevitable ultimate success against the odds.
The perpetual likability of the character does blatantly serve to massage Murphy's ego, the assumed hilarity of Moore's stand-up performances is hackneyed and the ending has to be sprayed in schmaltz, of course, but it's such good-natured fun, and the realisation that Murphy can actually do drama as well in the occasional scene when he's required to is so startling, that it would be mean-minded to begrudge him a long-overdue justified return to respectability.

6/10