Imagine That

Is it possible that the makers of "Imagine That," Eddie Murphy's bizarre new family movie, paid more for the permissions to feature several Beatles songs than they did for the actual script? It seems that way, as the movie labors through a forest of muddled logic, inconsistencies and uncomfortable characterizations, clutching at "All You Need is Love" and "Nowhere Man" as if they were plot points instead of part of the soundtrack.

Murphy plays Evan, a busy financial advisor who works in downtown Denver. Signs of his success are everywhere. For starters, he never looks at just one computer screen; he needs at least three to handle all the numbers he's crunching. Then there are his homes. His killer bachelor pad is decked out in mohair velvet and gleaming surfaces. Meanwhile, his pretty ex-wife Trish (Nicole Ari Parker) who we're told -- in the approximately 45 seconds of character development she's allotted -- works for a struggling nonprofit makes do in a colonial mansion.

They have just one child, Olivia (the luminous Yara Shahidi), a 6-year-old with a pet blanky and a large circle of imaginary friends. They have names like Gupita and Supita and possibly Poopita, but I could have imagined that. Evan only half listens whenever Olivia brings them up, and he can't be blamed; the whole crew of imaginary companions would be grating even if Olivia were your own child.

The movie's central plot point is that workaholic Evan doesn't have time for his child. His career is at a crisis point due to the new financial advisor in town, a guy named Johnny Whitefeather (Thomas Haden Church), who is stealing Evan's clients by spouting faux Native American nonsense about waterfalls and soaring eagles. Evan tries to pawn Olivia off on her mother during the rare week when he has to care for her. Trish asks -- rather cordially, I thought -- if he ever wanted to have kids. Yes, he says, "I just never thought I'd be so bad at it."

Evan is a lousy, impatient parent, and the scenes in which he demonstrates this are some of the movie's most interesting, albeit uncomfortable moments. He treats Olivia almost as a stranger until he finds out that Olivia's secret world, which she accesses by getting under her blanket (called the Goo-Ga), is full of sage financial advice that can easily trump Johnny Whitefeather's. Then and only then, Evan finally begins playing with his child, in order to get Gupita et al's opinion on mergers and acquisitions.

Having established himself as cold and charmless, it's difficult to buy Evan's transition into what is essentially Eddie Murphy -- the silly, smirking, very funny master of imitation and gleeful goofing. If the movie is at all true to itself or human experience, Evan should be awkward in his new role. He should not be a comic savant, teaching his daughter to sing "All You Need Is Love" with the kind of hammy, semi-girlish playfulness that is a Murphy specialty.

Not that Murphy actually gets to be all that funny. In the script's most egregious offense, during an absurd corporate competition to see who ascends to the corner office, Evan develops a fervent need to consult the Goo-Ga. It makes no sense. The good advice came only with Olivia acting as the blanky's medium. Olivia watches sadly as Daddy plays the fool, sneaking around trying to steal her Goo-Ga. He's completely creepy. From behind me, a baffled child in the audience asked his mother, "Why does he want the Goo-Ga?" Exactly.

"Imagine That" is so confused about itself that it makes you wonder if there was some last-minute genre switch, from grown-up comedy to something more in tune with the family audience, which happily eats up anything Murphy does involving hapless parenting (see "Daddy Day Care"). Johnny Whitefeather is offensive and incongruous, but you can almost see where he might fit in if director Karey Kirkpatrick had been making a nasty, fun corporate parody like "Thank You for Smoking." Instead what we get is cut more from the mold of "Bedtime Stories," another celebration of the imagination story. I'm all for imagination, but watching "Imagine That," you feel as though the audience is being asked to do altogether too much imagining of its own, just to make the movie make sense.

Mary Pols is a Bay Area-based journalist. She reviews movies for Time.com and was for many years a film critic for the San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times. She is also the author of a memoir, "Accidentally on Purpose," published in 2008 by Ecco/ Harper Collins. When she's inspired, usually by something weird, she blogs about it at www.maryfpols.com.