 Beverly Hills Cop
1 9 8 4
(USA)
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. |
