Beverly Hills Cop

(viewed August 27, 1999 on video)

There are some movies you just shouldn’t go back to.  I don’t know what it was that 80s viewers thought was so great about this movie to make it one of the top grossing films of that decade.  Perhaps viewers were so enraptured by the premise of the film as to not notice how poorly it was executed.  Exhibit A:  Eddie Murphy swaggers through the plot with a monstrous chip on his shoulder; he’s more arrogant than amusing.  Exhibit B: the Beverly Hills police don’t pose Murphy with much of a challenge.  Not at any time is Murphy’s character in any danger of failing at his goal, making the plot completely devoid of suspense.  The threats and actions made to restrain Axel Foley are obviously hollow, and when Foley thwarts the strip-joint robbery the chief of police suddenly takes a liking to him.  The cops are like the ninjas at the end of Bowfinger; all Murphy has to do is make a motion, and they fall down.  This could be why Foley never shows his wit other than the banana in the tailpipe trick. 

The banana was really the one memory I had of the movie that for over a decade sustained the image of a hip trickster black cop getting by on his wits rather than his weapons.  I’ve been imagining a similar kind of hero of Asian descent for an action movie, inspired by both the Monkey King and Axel Foley.  I’ll have to scratch the latter off my list, as Foley seems to be little more than Murphy trying to prove his machoness.  In this movie he gets to fire his gun, punch people, curse indiscriminately and even take a bullet in the arm.  Murphy must have had a crisis with his masculinity during this period, because he plays it excessively tough as Axel.  Or it could be the signature stamp of testosterone by Simpson and Bruckheimer, a type of macho insecure repressed-homosexual that they perfected in Top Gun.

The real find in revisiting this film is Judge Reinhold.  His wide-eyed, bewilderedly boyish grin often took my eyes away from Murphy’s smartass leers.  Reinhold’s Billy is the only character who goes through any kind of transformation (lucky that anyone does).  It’s ostensibly a thankless character type, but Reinhold endows it with giddy humility that’s disarmingly fresh.  After he stands defiantly with his badge in the air, barking out the command he learned from detective training, his face flushes with power beyond his wildest dreams.  There is a character I’ll gladly borrow.

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