Bill Murray Has Never Seen Anything On Netflix

These early incidents are lame time-fillers, and only bearable because of the ramshackle, off-the-cuff energy Murray brings to Richie.

“That’s going to be very wonderful”, Murray told ET of the special, which is being helmed by his Lost in Translation director Sofia Coppola.

Not only is the special coming to Netflix, but Murray also had a hand in creating the special for Netflix with Sofia Coppola and Mitch Glazer. Barry Levinson, decades away from the glories of “Avalon” and “Bugsy”, is unable to channel his star’s enormous charm into anything more than a meandering, intermittently amusing performance.

Richie wanders around and bumps into an American hooker (Kate Hudson), a mercenary (Bruce Willis) and a couple of stoned gun runners (Danny McBride and Scott Caan).

Walking out of the film, I might have given it a C+ or a C based purely on the fumes of Murray’s better work that are present here, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more infuriating it is to see something this lazy and familiar from Murray at this point. The movie opens with him asleep (bad sign) behind a desk in a rundown office, dozing off while scamming a prospective client out of a management fee. The idea of parachuting Bill Murray as a washed-up ’60s rock tour manager into the nightmare of contemporary Afghanistan no doubt seemed like too promising a fish-out-of-water story not to pursue.

The film’s convoluted plot hinges on a series of meet-cutes with various supporting characters who only serve to deposit Richie more firmly into bizarro territory.

Relationships are set up and swiftly abandoned (a tender moment between Richie and his young daughter is only referred to in the briefest of terms later, while Deschanel’s character goes missing after the film’s first act is never seen again), and disparate narrative threads flit in and out of frame and attention. Cruising through the mean streets of Kabul in a convertible, smoking pot, cracking wise, dodging armed gangs and finally alighting at a heavily fortified disco, the two resemble a pair of Colonel Kurtzes who went upriver only to discover the Electric Daisy Carnival waiting for them, and for a few precious minutes, the film suggests a sharp turn into satire. The initial claim made by Butler alleged that Murray abused her and that he is addicted to alcohol and marijuana. She performs Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” in English and her performance earns death threats for her and her family. That girl is a star! Richie would love to put her on Afghan Star, a show similar to American Idol, but finds the villagers, and seemingly much of the country, are not interested in having a woman sing in public.