Trading Places (1983)
Retro Review #23: Good story, lots of laughs, but ultimately, too much unnecessary baggage.
Trading Places (1983) — Good story, lots of laughs, but ultimately, too much unnecessary baggage.
+ Feature film, 1h 56m
B ^
Family Suitability
+ ❌3️⃣ Heavy adults-only content. | R
Alignment with Judeo-Christian Values
+ ⛔3️⃣ Very Poor/Heavily Unfavorable
+ 1️⃣/3 films in Duke & Duke universe ⭐
Trading Places (1983)
Grade: B ^ (1.0) / HOF: 0
EQ 👍A- | 📖A- 👥A 📽️A- 🎼A-
DW 🚫0.4| 🌚8 🌝0
POPCAP 💯n/a 🍿n/a 🧢n/a
L-R ☮️n/a ◀️n/a ▶️n/a 🛐n/a
Comedian Eddie Murphy began his career as a stand-up comedian after being inspired by a Richard Pryor album. Four years later in 1980 he rose to stardom as a regular cast member of Saturday Night Live. His first three feature films in the 1980s catapulted him to superstar status, and “Trading Places” was the second, between 1982’s “48 Hrs.” and 1984’s “Beverly Hills Cop.”
Murphy’s acting hero and inspiration was Peter Sellers for his ability to play a wide variety of characters, even in just one film! (For example, The Mouse That Roared.) Murphy developed the same skill to a world class level, serving him well on the sketch comedy SNL show.
The Mouse That Roared (1959)
The Mouse That Roared (1959) — Peter Sellers leads the tiny nation of Grand Fenwick in an amusing assault against America.
This skill also is the driving force that has landed Trading Places not just on eight of ten all-time Christmas movie lists I checked, but also on quite a few all-time funniest movies lists.
And it is more of a comedy set during the Christmas season, with a crime caper thrown in, than a movie about Christmas, so that fits.
Murphy’s character is a street beggar/con man, Billy Ray Valentine, who plays various roles to achieve his objectives. It’s when he’s putting on a new persona that this movie is at its funniest and best.
The story is entertaining in its own right. Two rich old geezers, make a bet on an experiment about how an advantaged man and a disadvantaged man would perform if their circumstances were exchanged.
Valentine is the bewildered early beneficiary of this scheme, while Louis Winthorpe III, played by Dan Aykroyd, is equally bewildered as his life falls apart. It’s fun watching the experiment take shape and it’s even more fun watching the experiment’s subjects on their path out of bewilderment back to confident self-determination.
Personally, I’ve laughed more and harder during a lot of films, and the story was very good, but not great. There was a little bit of anti-conservative, class envy, left-wing bias, but you could miss it if you blinked at the right times. Ironically, today’s humorless woke left would find the film more offensive than I did, for several reasons. I’d still give the film an A- on comedy and plot alone.
But this was the second straight R-rated Christmas movie on our 2024 Christmas Tour, and while not as objectionable as Black Christmas, it’s still 100% not for kids or teens, if you ask me.
This movie had as many or more instances of language as Black Christmas if you just count words. For me there were two reasons why it was less off-putting in this movie.
Firstly, it was mostly obscenities in this movie, with minimal profanities. (Obscenities being crude or vulgar language like the F-word, while profanities are swearing using God’s names, replacing reverence with disrespect.)
Secondly, in this film the obscenity was used to illustrate which social class characters were from. The upper class characters studiously avoided obscenities, until, that is, they became scared or angry and let their true colors show. Meanwhile, Valentine isn’t trying to be obscene, it’s just a fact of his life and vocabulary that he uses those words without thinking and we see him making a conscious effort when he wants to avoid them.
So even though I wouldn’t want my kids exposed to the language in Trading Places, it didn’t affect my grade much as entertainment for adults.
However, the overuse of female nudity, and other values issues with the film, did cause me to drop my grade from an A- down to a B. It had more nudity than an average R-rated film, didn’t need it, and could have told the story just as well without it. I wouldn’t want my kids exposed to that, either. In the future, I’ll explain in greater detail why I lower grades for nudity in entertainment, even when it’s only intended for adult audiences. It deserves a longer explanation than I want to include here.
In the Substack, Unpop Culture, writer Cap Stewart addresses this subject a lot, among other things. I generally agree with his views and reasoning, and I heartily recommend his stack.
I also recommend the usage of VidAngel dot com to anyone who wishes to filter out content they would prefer not be included in their entertainment. It can filter language and nudity for example, but in a movie like this one you will still be left with its humanist world view and left-wing stereotypes.
The universe of Trading Places didn’t end with this film. Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche who played the two rich geezers, brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke, reprise their roles in Coming to America, an Eddie Murphy film where he uses his exceptional comedic acting skills to play four new roles in the Duke & Duke universe.
Onwards!
+ last viewed (3) 2025-12-12, HDX7, 1.85v, 1M
+ first viewed 1983-06, ThX, 1.85, 1
+ Genre Line Goes Here
Family Suitability Detail
+ ❌3️⃣ Heavy adults-only content. | R
+ 😡+2 😵💫-2 🤬-3 🤭-2 🫣-3
Judeo-Christian Values Detail
+ ⛔3️⃣ Very Poor/Heavily Unfavorable
+ ✝️✝️ -3 ➕❤️❤️🥴 ➖😐😐(🤬)💣🔥(🩳)👙👙👙(🍺💉)
+ ✡️✡️ -1 ➕🌗💎💎 ➖😐😐🤬🌓🖤
+ 🗽 -4 ➕🏦💛💛💛 ➖😐😐💻💻💻💲💲💲☠️🤎🤎🤎
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Originally posted to text group 2024-12-12
Re-reviewed and updated 2025-12-12
Note from Rick Retro: This review was originally posted December 12, 2024 to a select group of friends and family via a text group. We have roughly five times as many subscribers in our community now, so I am working on formatting and uploading all those old reviews to Substack for all of you and future subscribers as well.
At that time, I had not completely developed my full review format, so I am also re-reviewing most of these works to match the format of my newer reviews. Since these posts were almost entirely holiday themed from a 2024 Christmas Tour, I am now uploading these reviews as part of a 2025 Christmas Tour, all intended to get my archives completed while giving new subscribers a chance to experience older reviews on a measured basis.
But if you’d rather just start from the original beginning, visit this post and follow the “Next (all sections) ➡️” links at the end of each post, until you arrive at this one, where that link will be dead, until I upload the next post from our text group archives 😉. When the next post is not yet available, there will be a link to the post that is “Next Available, skipping over text group posts not yet uploaded ➡️”
The first post to Substack after the current “Text Group Gaps” of posts I have not yet uploaded can be found here. From this post, following the “Next (all sections) ➡️” links will bring you all the way to the most current post.
This note will disappear when the next text group post is added, and this review takes its rightful spot in our archives. For now, I hope you enjoy this look into Christmas past!