'BEING EDDIE': NETFLIX'S POLISHED PORTRAIT OF A MAN WHO—BY THE END—REMAINS A PUZZLE

There are few American entertainers whose résumés span over four decades, multiple genres across multiple generations. And then there's Eddie Murphy—yes, the Eddie Murphy—a man who's spent over 40 years shapeshifting through the culture like someone testing the limits of his own charm.

Murphy’s career is less a straight line and more a constellation: loud, bright, and glimmering with contradictions. You start with the early stand-up (Delirious and Raw, where he swaggered across the stage in head to toe, matching leather ensambles). You move to the blockbuster era (48 Hrs., Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop). The “he played every character at the dinner table” era. The family-friendly bag (Daddy Day Care, Shrek), the occasional critical comeback (Dolemite Is My Name). And the quieter years when he seemed intent on slipping out of the spotlight entirely, appearing every few years only to remind everyone that he still had “it,” whatever “it” was.

Murphy has always seemed both deeply present in the culture and oddly absent from it—a superstar who insists on his privacy, a global figure who rarely gives the kind of interviews that leave you feeling like you actually know him. This is the puzzle Being Eddie sets out to solve.

Y'all Be Cool.

Being Eddie, Netflix’s glossy new Murphy documentary, arrives in an entertainment landscape where celebrity docu-nostalgia is basically its own genre. We get the archival footage. The softly lit talking heads. Celebrities saying sentences like, “Eddie was always the kind of guy who…” followed by anecdotes that vaguely imply he's a genius who also maybe didn’t sleep. And each anecdote is punctuated with indulgent shots of his cathedral like mansion and its retractable roof.

While the camera gawks at the spoils of Murphy’s career, he remains at pains to tell viewers that his day-to-day routine isn’t much different from theirs: he goes to work, hangs out with his family and falls asleep to MTV’s Ridiculousness. Director Angus Wall seems acutely aware that Murphy doesn’t do vulnerability on command. So instead, he focuses on trajectory—how Eddie ascended, how Eddie reinvented, how Eddie endured. It’s a smart structural pivot, even if it means we’re watching a documentary about a man who will not be documented.

We see the childhood stories, the Bushwick apartment, the complicated family structure Murphy has always nodded to but never really unpacked. We get the early stand-up hustle, stitched together from smoky club footage and audio clips that sound like they were recovered from a shoebox under a bed. And of course, the SNL years where  the surviving members of the original cast appear to testify, practically swearing under oath that Murphy saved the show.

A cavalcade of stars—Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, Tracy Morgan, Tracee Ellis Ross, Kevin Hart, Jerry Seinfeld, Jerry Bruckheimer—arrive like a rotating royal court, paying tribute not just to Murphy’s once-in-a-generation comedic talents but to his ability to detonate racial barriers in Hollywood and reroute the path for every Black comedian who came after him. Yet for all the high-wattage eulogizing, the documentary grounds its narrative in Murphy’s own voice.

It’s Murphy who tells the story straight to camera, whether settled into a chair or wandering the manicured sprawl of his Southern California estate, guiding us through his life with the practiced elegance of a man who’s been famous longer than he hasn’t.

But where the documentary begins to wobble is in its middle stretch, when it attempts to bridge the Eddie Murphy we know—the megawatt star—with the Eddie Murphy we should know—the simple man behind the myth. It’s not that the documentary lacks information. It’s that it lacks intimacy. Murphy appears in fresh interviews throughout the film, but he is still self-possessed to the point of impenetrability. He tells stories the way politicians answer debate questions: circling what he should say, never touching what he really wants to say.

They Put Some Blow on the Table.

When the film arrives at the ‘90s, things get interesting in theory and frustrating in execution. Murphy’s transition into mainstream Hollywood royalty is chronicled with the expected celebration—box office numbers, global stardom, the era where he seemed to own every screen larger than a microwave. But the rougher beats—the career misfires, the public controversies, the shifting comedic landscape that made him feel increasingly out of step—are handled with velvet gloves. There’s an entire section on the infamous Oscars snub for Dreamgirls that feels like it’s gearing up to offer something revelatory, only to give us a polite shrug and a vibe check.

The documentary is much more confident when charting his comedic evolution. We get clips from Raw juxtaposed with scenes from Shrek. His voice acting is treated as part of his legacy rather than a detour, which feels refreshing and overdue. And when the film digs into how Murphy’s presence shaped Black comedy as an institution—how he served as a bridge between Redd Foxx and Chris Rock, between Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle—it finally hits its stride.

This is where the documentary becomes genuinely illuminating: tracing a lineage, not a life.

Still, there’s a lingering sense that Being Eddie wants depth but is too polite to demand it. Wall has assembled something beautiful, loving, and respectful—but a film uninterested in pressing its subject is a film that will only ever skim the surface. Murphy lets us see the edges of his humanity, but never quite the center. And maybe that’s by design. Eddie Murphy has been performing for us since he was a teenager; Perhaps Being Eddie is his way of saying, “You’ve seen enough.”

Still Eddie in the Morning.

To its credit, Being Eddie sticks the landing. The final act, which chronicles Murphy’s late-career relationship with fame, family, and self-preservation, feels honest in a way the first half doesn’t.

When Murphy speaks about consciously choosing anonymity over spectacle, there’s a refreshing clarity. He calls fame “a season,” not a destiny. There’s something both grounding and myth-breaking in hearing an icon say he’d rather be at home on the couch than chasing another blockbuster.

Angus Wall ends the film not with a crescendo but a quiet understanding: Eddie Murphy does not owe us his wounds. He never did. What he has given—talent, laughter, a generation of comedic architecture—is more than enough.

3.75/5 ★: A two-hour reminder that Eddie Murphy is, in fact, hilarious.