Chandler Jarrell (Eddie Murphy) is a Los Angeles social worker who specialises in finding missing children. When he is approached to locate a kidnapped child mystic known as the Golden Child, Chandler is incredulous – but before long he is neck-deep in a world of magic, murder, snake-women, and demons.

The Golden Child was an odd feature film project back in 1986. Originally developed as a supernatural detective story to star Mel Gibson, it was offered to and rejected by John Carpenter before being re-imagined as an action-comedy vehicle for Eddie Murphy. Murphy had his eye on appearing in Star Trek IV at the time, but was convinced to lend his talents to this instead. After all, why waste Murphy’s box office appeal on a film that was likely to be profitable with or without him?

So Star Trek IV was a commercial success without Murphy’s help, and John Carpenter found his own Chinese-themed urban fantasy to direct (Big Trouble in Little China). Eddie Murphy starred in The Golden Child: an odd bastard child of unsuccessful rewrites, and an action-comedy with little action and not much humour. What comedy there is comes from Murphy’s standard quick wit and funny repartee. Attempts beyond that either fall flat, or simply are not there at all. Charlotte Lewis suffers particularly as sidekick Kee Nang. She gets very little to do, and despite some early action sequences winds up serving as a victim for the protagonist to rescue.

Charles Dance plays the villainous – and ridiculously named – Sardo Numspa. He plays the part in a classic British fashion of shutting one’s eyes, thinking of England, and collecting a paycheck – a technique perfected by Jeremy Irons over the years. Honestly there is not much for him to do. There is not much for anybody to do. The film is dreadfully under-written. You can still sort of see the more hard-boiled detective version of the story if you turn your head and squint a bit, and you can definitely see the influence of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films on the end result. It is even possible to see the potential of shifting Eddie Murphy out of comedy and into action-fantasy. There is a version of The Golden Child that would work – and work well. All that is missing is iconic action, better dialogue, an interesting plot, and some kind of realised characters.

Some times there is an urge to revisit an old movie, to see if perhaps it was better than one remembered, or some kind of ‘ahead-of-it’s-time’ gem. The Golden Child is neither of these things. It is patchy, underwhelming, and ultimately a little dispiriting. The ingredients are decent. The recipe is sour.