I went to watch this movie after reading a good review in the paper and because I have always loved Eddie Murphy in his older movies like ’Coming to America’. After the movie finished I felt I should have watched Bruce Almightly! Oh my god was it NOT funny. I was very calm throughout and hence highly un-amused considering this movie is supposed to be a comedy.
Daddy Day Care is a movie about two men (one of which is Eddie Murphy) who are dropped from their stable jobs and so are sitting at home. Eddie Murphy thinks im at home with the kid while my wife goes to work so why not set up a daycare centre. Eddie and his mate both have a wife and child of their own and they think how hard can afew more children be!? So Charlie (Eddie Murphy), Phil (Jeff Garlin) and new guy Marvin (Steve Zahn) all set up this centre. But thats where the comedy starts and the kids go wild and adults go nuts chasing after them. Theres also another professional daycare centre not far away, where the teachers are strict and the headmistress Mrs.Harridan (Anjelica Huston) is jealous of this new daycare centre. So Eddie has to deal with kids and jealous competition who is bent on closing daddy daycare down.
Eddie Murphy is my first disapointment with this movie, he is not as energetic as he used to be in beverly hills cop or the nutty professor. He doesnt have any good jokes, or any jokes at all rather. His face is very much glum throughout the whole movie. The big Eddie Murphy smile that we saw so much in Beverly Hills Cop is almost completely absent. He doesnt even improvise his comedy acting which we saw so much in the Nutty Professor. I don’t know maybe its because hes getting old! The movie itself has a simple storyline but thats ok for comedy movies because its the acting and art of a an actor that makes it ultimately funny. The script must have been written by a man being tortured to write some comedy because it needed to be scraped and written anew. Jeff Garlin and Steve Zahn tried their best up and they are not bad at comedy but theres not much they can do with a bad script and if the main guy Eddie is not up to scratch. The plot had a good direction for comedy but the comedy was not good enough. The jokes where very unoriginal and sometimes just plain not funny. Maybe if they put abit of character into the actors that would have been better. Instead of having the star trek obsessed character of Steve Zahn they could have had an attractive, not very intelligent female who has a good heart but is abit of a bimbo. That would have balanced things out. The way it looked was like two office men and a neighbour looking after kids.