Entertainment

CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP

EDDIE Murphy, it’s too late to save yourself from the bottomless pit of lame into which you have cast yourself. Did you have to drag The Beatles down there with you?

“Imagine That,” which is studded (infested?) with simpering covers of Beatles songs that sound like they were produced by Barney, stars an extravagantly miscast Murphy as a buttoned-down financial manager too busy to make time for the 7-year-old daughter (Yara Shahidi) whose custody he splits with his ex (Nicole Ari Parker).

Murphy is the opposite of what we need, which is an actor who is hard to picture cutting loose and acting childish when his girl’s chatter with her imaginary friends turns out to yield unerring stock-market tips. (No explanation is ever given for this gift, not even one as weak as the fortune-telling machine in “Big.”)

Evan (Murphy) bonds with the girl in pretend visits to her magical world so he can get her market views, which he passes along to his clients verbatim: One firm, he notes, is about to get its pants pulled down (this turns out to mean a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation), and those pants are filled with poop (fraudulent accounting).

Cutesy? My pain was acutesy as the entire plot yawned before me. An hour and three-quarters to show Evan being a distant father, getting in touch with his inner child, making a lot of money but ultimately realizing that family is more important? That isn’t three acts — it’s three minutes, or should have been.

If you’re hoping for some imaginative special effects, don’t. We never see the girl’s make-believe world, just a few hundred scenes of Murphy frolicking, dancing, singing and (internally) suffering as his character extracts info from the girl. If at some point he had used eyelid Morse code to blink out an SOS — like a hostage alerting the commandos — I wouldn’t have been surprised.

At work, Evan is taking heat from a rival (Thomas Haden Church, or at least I think that’s him, under a wig that looks like an animal pelt), who presents himself as an American Indian guided by spirit wisdom (“In the middle of the night the dream sparrow comes to me”) that sounds more like peyote talking. Since no Hollywood studio is likely to poke fun at Native Americans, it’s obvious from the start that his character is lying about his ancestry, but the movie saves this as its idea of a twist.

As for its idea of wordplay, try this: “You make huge deals every day. I’m sure you’ll find a way to deal with her.”

Throughout, the actual financial advice (“Buy long, sell short. Sell short, buy long!”) given by supposed pros is such distilled gibberish as to suggest the screenwriters simply cut and pasted random words found in the Wall Street Journal. Murphy, in a scene meant to reassure us that he is a whiz, is shown guaranteeing his clients a return of 9 to 11 percent a year, a textbook warning sign of fraud.

Why don’t the SEC’s poop police come and pull his pants down? Come to think of it, in a bold new era of regulatory experimentation, why aren’t there script inspectors tasked with notifying movies that they’re imaginatively bankrupt?

kyle.smith@nypost.com

IMAGINE THAT

Junk bonding.

Running time: 106 minutes. Rated PG (mild profanity, brief questionable behavior). At the E-Walk, the Magic Johnson, the 84th Street, others.