Women of Action: Charlotte Lewis – The Golden Child
I don’t hear many people talking about The Golden Child these days. There was a time when everything that Eddie Murphy touched turned to box office gold but that’s often forgotten in times such as these. The man hasn’t made a hit movie in some time and any fan of his from the mid 80’s would shart themselves if they saw how poorly regarded his movies have been in the last 15 years or so. My solution… more Charlotte Lewis!
Charlotte was only 18 during the filming of The Golden Child but her on screen presence and sheer beauty made her appear several years older. I’m almost certain that Murphy’s character Chandler Jerrell, who was a private detective specifically looking for missing children, didn’t know that he had the hots for a girl who was barely legal.
The case that Chandler Jerrell takes in The Golden Child is much different than the usual missing children that he seeks out. This one is to find a boy (played for some reason by a girl!) with special religious significance that is being sought out by a bunch of demons and downright evil dudes. The fact that Eddie Murphy doesn’t really take much of the mysticism and Buddhist stuff too seriously helps this movie from getting into too much fantasy. Many people don’t know but John Carpenter was almost the director of The Golden Child but ended up doing Big Trouble in Little China that year instead. There are many similarities between the movies if you ask me but one thing that Big Trouble doesn’t have is a young lady by the name of Charlotte Lewis.
When the shit starts hitting the fan for Chandler he finds that Charlotte’s character Kee Nang is more than just a pretty face. She kicks so much ass throughout the movie that you can tell that while Murphy is called “the chosen one”, he would have been dead a dozen times over without the kickass skills of Kee Nang.
