Not being a parent myself, I’ll leave it to viewers with kids of their own to decide if young audiences actually want to watch a movie about corporate one-upmanship in a stock brokerage and about a parent who rediscovers his inner child. It seems to me that the pre-tweens to whom “Imagine That” is targeted would be much more interested in seeing a story about someone their own age, but this film keeps cutting away from its father-daughter relationship, even though those scenes are the strongest.
The father here is Evan Danielson (Eddie Murphy), who’s far more concerned with getting promoted at his firm than with spending time with his young daughter Olivia (Yara Shahidi), who gets passed back and forth between Evan’s apartment (which looks like every other soulless-yuppie bachelor pad you’ve ever seen in a movie) and the home of Evan’s ex-wife Trish (Nicole Ari Parker).
Olivia’s teachers assume she’s still clinging to her security blanket and talking to imaginary princesses because of Evan’s aloofness and the instability of her parents’ divorce, but Evan starts paying lots more attention to Olivia when he realizes that her princess pals are actually brilliant stock analysts, predicting success and failure that no one else sees coming. And so, as in that “Simpsons” episode where Homer grows close to Lisa once she starts perfectly predicting all the games in his football pool, Evan follows Olivia into her imaginary world once her invisible friends make him an invaluable commodity around the office.
But is Evan merely using his daughter? And will his Native American co-worker Johnny Whitefeather (Thomas Haden Church) steal Evan’s thunder by rustling up a mystical blanket of his own?
The smartest thing that the creators of “Imagine That” concocted was never to show us the world of Olivia’s imaginary friends. Evan never sees it, and neither does the audience, so all of us have to take its existence on faith. The scenes where Murphy has to pretend to sing to dragons or dance at a ball are among the film’s highlights — he and Shahidi have real chemistry, and their interactions capture the best of what parent-and-child bonding moments can be.
Unfortunately, there’s all too little of that magic and too much of scenes in boardrooms where characters talk about “asset management” and “insider trading” and other terms that will make kids tune out of the story. And why is Eddie Murphy still trying to get laughs out of vicious gay stereotypes? His eye-bugging and lips-pursing and air-snapping isn’t just nasty, it’s lazy. Didn’t Murphy getting called on the carpet for that crap by queer African-American filmmaker Marlon Riggs in “Tongues Untied” have any effect?
The movie does at least boast a fine cast of supporting players, notably Church as a ridiculous parody of New Age sentiments crossed with crass capitalism. (Lest you think the casting of the WASP-y actor as an indigenous person is brown-face, “Imagine That” provides a fitting punchline for the character.) It’s always great to see performers like Parker, Ronny Cox, Mel Harris and Martin Sheen, even when they’re just breezing through.
If Eddie Murphy wants to apply his comedic gifts to kiddie movies, more power to him. I just wish they were better than “Imagine That” (or “Daddy Day Care” or “Meet Dave”). His scenes with Shahidi prove that he can manage a real rapport with young performers — why the makers of this movie back-burnered that in favor of more scenes about stock projections, I can’t imagine.
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