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Trading Places Movie Review

Trading Places is a 1983 comedy film directed by John Landis and starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. It’s a solid and fun, but deeply flawed movie.

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“He was wearing my Harvard tie.

Can you believe it? My Harvard tie.

Like oh, sure he went to Harvard“

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A snobbish investor and a wily street con artist find their positions reversed as part of a bet by two callous millionaires. This was one of the biggest films at the box office for this year and it remains a respected movie that is regarded as one of the best comedies of the decade. I personally prefer ‘Coming to America’, but just like that flick, this one also stumbles down the line.

The first half was terrific. This section made me smile, laugh and generally have a great time as it’s a riot that benefits from a particularly strong Mark Twain-inspired premise that was ripe for the comedy genre treatment and for this decade in particular. The dialogue was stellar and the situations were quite amusing.

My issue is that the second half is much inferior with the third acting being particularly problematic. The film is often compared favorably to screwball comedies from the thirties, but the comparison simply isn’t apt not just because this movie is infinitely inferior, but more importantly because it fails to include an anti-capitalist message.

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Exactly the opposite was the case here as the protagonist gets rich and the movie, thus, tells us that money really is the most important thing in life. This ending spelled hypocrisy and it felt inconsistent to everything that came before it. Couple that with those ridiculous gorillas and other unfortunately campy elements and you’ve got a film that pretty much functioned as a slick, powerful vehicle that eventually ended in a train crash.

Eddie Murphy was so great here that it was frustrating seeing him get sidelined throughout long stretches of the film. His line delivery was particularly fantastic and so were his facial expressions. He really stole the movie from everybody else in this competent cast. Dan Aykroyd is actually very good in Trading Places, but his accent was annoying and the two characters did not share enough screen time together. The older actors all delivered strong performances whereas Jamie Lee Curtis was excellent in her first significant comedy turn that led to more future roles in this genre.

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The movie is very funny at times, but John Landis failed to direct the movie in a more polished and streamlined way and the script was too chaotically composed and not as sophisticated as the themes demanded it to be. The soundtrack and acting are excellent, but a shorter runtime and better pacing were in order in this instance.