The Nutty Professor

[1996, Movie]

The Nutty Professor: Review

This remake of Jerry Lewis's 1963 Jekyll and Hyde comedy is slackly directed and overloaded with flatulence jokes. Still, like Lewis before him, Eddie Murphy turns the dual roles of a meek academician and his smarmy alter ego, Buddy Love, into an excoriating exercise in self-disclosure. Professor Sherman Klump is a sweet, brainy fat man whose life is a series of small but bitter humiliations. When his wayward posterior trips the switch that unleashes thousands of lab hamsters, the only one that doesn't escape is the roly-poly star of Klump's experiments in weight control through DNA restructuring. Klump decides to test the formula on himself after a disastrous date with Carla Purty (Jada Pinkett), during which he's humiliated by a vicious insult comedian. Enter Buddy Love, a vulgar, strutting sleaze with a smooth line in bullying repartee and a world-class case of testosterone poisoning. Sound familiar? Murphy plays a bravura total of seven roles -- including a dead-on imitation of Richard Simmons -- but Love is the keeper, the demonic embodiment of the comic's barely concealed rage.