Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
 Eddie
Murphy's rise from street urchin to mega millionaire was swift,
and it wasn't long before they were writing specially tailored
vehicles for him, the way they used to order up scripts for Gable,
Bogart, and the Marx Brothers.
Beverly Hills Cop is a custom-made comedy from the Eddie
Murphy fitting room. Chock-full of noise, rhythm, and smart-ass
dialogue, it fits the cool, fresh mouthed, jive-ass hipness of
Murphy's screen persona like a glove.
The movie begins with a series of car crunches as the
finger-popping comedian busts a slimy gang of cigarette hijackers
in Detroit, and ends with another blast of gunfire and violence
(much of it tongue-in-cheek instead of the usual bloody gore) as
he outwits a slimy gang of drug smugglers in posh Beverly Hills.
The property damage in between is inestimable.
Murphy plays Axel Foley of the Detroit Police Department.
Always in hot water, he just can't play by the rules. When an old
childhood pal is murdered, he ignores the warning by his own
superiors to stay out of the case and heads for Beverly Hills to
find the killers.
In jeans and sneakers, he checks into the swankiest hotel by
posing as a Rolling Stone reporter who's doing a piece on
Michael Jackson, and sets about making the Beverly Hills cops,
with their three-piece Johnny Carson suits and their charge
accounts at Spago, look like snide, aging preppy jokes.
 Square, conservative, and clean-cut, they are outsmarted every
time by the Detroit punk with the Saturday Night Live
charisma.
Much of the humour in Beverly Hills Cop is distilled
from Axel's head-on collision with the sterile state-of-the-art
mentality of the Beverly Hills Police Force and the unreal foreign
planet ozone layer of La-La Land culture in general.
Finding the killers and exposing a cocaine racket inside the
California art world becomes secondary to the humorous clash
between Murphy and everything that personifies Hollywood's
favourite word . . . 'trendy'.
Along the way, an oddball friendship develops between the
Detroit skull-buster and two Beverly Hills detectives, as Axel
teaches the suit-wearing conservatives a few things.
The overweight, square detective and the young, naive, refined
detective are played with restraint and humour by John Ashton and
Judge Reinhold, respectively.
Lisa Eilbacher lends stylish support as another of Axel's
childhood friends who bails him out of jail and offers him a
snazzy red sports car to drive and a pretty shoulder to lean on.
Every third word begins with F, but Murphy's wild and daring
personality has a winning nature. Two equally funny sequels
followed in 1987 and 1994.
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