“Beverly Hills Cop” had me laughing a lot and “Coming To America” had me in awe of his talents but Eddie Murphy’s feature-length, stand-up comedy, concert movie “Eddie Murphy Raw” or just “Raw” is really bad and never so much as cracked a smile during the whole thing and that’s a real shame because there is a talented man here but he’s wearing a big mask over it.

“Raw” begins with a sketch with a young Eddie Murphy with his family and that isn’t remotely funny. Then we get a quick part explaining how big Eddie Murphy and then we get the actual show full of what is known as ‘critical comedy’. Movies such as “Team America”, “Dr. Strangelove” and “Life Of Brian” have all successfully done it, some more so than others but “Raw” doesn’t even come close to making you laugh-out-loud. “Raw” is out to offend everybody (whites, blacks, rich people, poor people, homosexuals etc…) and the only few points it actually wants to make aren’t phrased well enough to make them work.

Eddie Murphy has a real knack for impersonations, being upbeat and talking really quickly but here he doesn’t do anything amusing with his talents, he clearly needs someone else writing his material. He uses an excessive amount of bad language but fails to do anything creative with it; a British film called “In The Loop” has obscene language but is funny due to the creativity that goes along with it.

“Raw” is disappointing and can be placed alongside many of the more recent Eddie Murphy films due to being about the same quality. I feel Murphy perhaps needs the censorship of movies because otherwise he delivers something that is merely offensive and it isn’t that is offensive that bothers me but rather that it just isn’t funny. If you want to see a talented man misusing his abilities then watch “Raw” but the rest of us will stick to the good stuff he’s done.