The Adventures of Pluto Nash Movie Review

The year is 2080 and not a damn thing has changed – wannabes still roam the universe looking for a gig, clubs still try to make a small budget look like a big one, and most movies still suck… this one in particular.

Eddie Murphy is, you guessed it, Pluto Nash… present club owner and former smuggler extraordinaire. As it starts, Pluto has been out of prison a week, already saving the lives of Polish accordion players in kilts, negotiating bookies into lending him millions of dollars, and turning the worst bar on the moon into the satellite’s hottest nightclub. Cut to seven years later and Pluto’s club is hot, the jokes aren’t, and a charming wannabe singer comes into the club looking for work, about five minutes before it gets blown up, leaving only Pluto, the singer, and an antiquated security robot named Bruno (Randy Quaid).

Can’t old Eddie go back to playing a mouthy mule?

The rest of the movie is spent wandering about the moon in zero-G character development as Pluto tries to figure out how to get in touch with the mysterious Rex Crater, moon mobster extraordinaire who blew up Pluto’s place.

Pluto Nash is perhaps one of the most boring comedies I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of some of the later work of Pauly Shore. Its jokes are tired, its advertisement-oversaturated look went out a little after Blade Runner, and its characters are so uninteresting you wish someone would hurry up and kill them. If you ever laugh from this movie, it’ll be at something you saw in the previews.

But movies like that don’t automatically warrant the especially low marks Pluto Nash deserves. Whereas your average comedy might not make you laugh, it might at least make you smirk a few times and might not make you wish to hurl foodstuffs at the screen. Pluto Nash annoyed me. Every single twist in Pluto Nash has been done a million times before, and some of its jokes get so old, so fast, you want to guzzle your Pepsi for an excuse to leave the theatre for a minute or two. But far worse than dumb jokes are dumb running jokes, like a horny robot’s simultaneous lusting after other electronics and quasi-homoerotic love for his boss, plus the absolutely annoying tendency of every character in the movie to start out by asking if Eddie Murphy is the Pluto Nash.

From the lunar highway-construction man gag at the beginning to the AC/DC joke at the end, The Adventures of Pluto Nash is, simply, very stupid and annoying. Let’s just hope the future turns out a little different.

In space... ahh, skip it.