[COLUMN] The Beverly Hills Cop Franchise is a Demonstration and a Cautionary Tale of Movie Star Power | by Darren Mooney

Eddie Murphy was only 23 years old when he made Beverly Hills Cop.

Of course, Murphy had already a lot of experience by this point. He had been doing stand-up since he was 15. He joined the cast of Saturday Night Live at the age of 19, and became the breakout star in one of the show’s most infamously disastrous seasons. By the age of 21, he’d already made the leap to movies, co-starring alongside Nick Nolte in Walter Hill’s 48 Hours. Still, Beverly Hills Cop was a big deal. It was the first film that was going to rest entirely on Murphy’s shoulders as a movie star.

Beverly Hills Cop would be a massive success. Wiseass Detroit police officer Axel Foley would become one of Murphy’s signature roles. Murphy has cited the films as among the most important of his career. Foley belongs to that most elite collection of pop culture characters, screen icons with an instantly recognizable theme tune.  In fact, the film is so beloved that it has merited Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, a legacyquel revisiting the character and concept 40 years after the original movie’s release.

Beverly Hills Cop is so inseparable from Murphy that it’s hard to believe that the film was never intended as a showcase for the comedian’s singular talents. As difficult as it might be to even imagine a version of Beverly Hills Cop without Murphy, the project was initially developed with Mickey Rourke in mind. Murphy wasn’t even the second choice for the film. By the time the movie’s eventual director, Martin Brest, came on board, it was being reconfigured as a Sylvester Stallone vehicle.

“My conception of it at the time was to do something with Stallone that nobody had ever seen before,” Brest confessed. “It had some comedic elements by virtue of the fish out of water, but he wrote this thing that was a straight-out action drama. That’s not what the studio really was looking to do, so he went off and he took that script and it became Cobra. So we wound up getting Eddie Murphy a few weeks before shooting.”

It is something of an understatement to suggest that Sylvester Stallone has a radically different screen persona to Eddie Murphy. As Stallone himself confessed, his version of Beverly Hills Cop would have been very different to the version that was actually released. “So I re-wrote the script to suit what I do best,” Stallone later explained, “and by the time I was done, it looked like the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan on the beaches of Normandy.”

On paper, this sounds like a recipe for disaster: a new and inexperienced actor is parachuted into the lead role of a project tailored to a very different performer. In practice, Beverly Hills Cop becomes a masterclass in movie stardom. It can be hard to quantify what exactly a movie star does or how they do it, and what separates them from other respected performers. However, what Murphy does in the original Beverly Hills Cop demonstrates that ineffable quality so beautifully.

Because Murphy joined the film so late, there was no time to adjust the movie to his sensibility. In fact, the basic structure of Beverly Hills Cop is very similar to any number of generic action films of the era. Prompted by the murder of his friend Mickey Tandino (James Russo), Detroit police officer Axel Foley decides to rogue and to chase the murderers outside of his jurisdiction to Los Angeles. There are a couple of big set pieces that could fit in the Stallone mold, like the opening lorry chase.

As such, Murphy has to work within what little space exists to make the  film his own. That means dealing with a plot that is already in place, locations that have already been booked, co-stars who have already been cast. Many of the individual scenes were already mapped out. It would be clear what the character needed to accomplish or what information needed to be imparted. However, Murphy was given freedom on the day to improvise to accomplish those narrative goals.

“It's spooky but every time we got into a jam, I'd turn to Eddie and say, ‘Can you come up with something?’” Brest explained of the creative process. “And every time, he came up with something that knocked me to the floor. He's a director's dream. He magnifies every bit of work you do by a thousandfold.” The film roars to life in these moments. Indeed, many of the best scenes in Beverly Hills Cop have nothing to do with action, and everything to do with Murphy improvising on set.

In hindsight, Beverly Hills Cop stands out in contrast to many of its action movie contemporaries because of Murphy’s star energy. It isn’t just that Murphy’s funny, it is that his charismatic and charming, vulnerable and empathetic. During the 1980s, action movie stars were turning into absurd cartoons of masculinity, the “hard bodies” of Stallone or Schwarzenegger. Movies were increasingly – and often absurdly – violent. Their heroes were unflinchingly macho.

In contrast, Murphy’s work in Beverly Hills Cop is almost disarmingly sincere. A large part of this is that Axel Foley really does feel out of his depth. There is no real mystery in Beverly Hills Cop. Axel pretty immediately deduces that the villainous Victor Mayhew (Steven Berkoff), who could just as easily have been the villain of a bad Lethal Weapon knock-off, murdered Mickey and is running drugs. However, the tension derives from the difficulty that Axel has in getting a clear run at Mayhew.

Foley’s first scene with Mayhew ends with Foley dragged from Mayhew’s office and thrown through a plate glass window out into the street, effectively beaten and humiliated by an art dealer. It’s very difficult to imagine the same Stallone who made Cobra agreeing to being so easily and casually defeated by a British character actor sitting behind a desk. Even today, the stars of these sorts of action movies are very sensitive about how they are portrayed on screen, reluctant to be defeated.

Murphy also gets to play a tenderness with Jenny Summers (Lisa Eilbacher), his old childhood friend who knew Mickey. In any other action movie of the era, the two characters would end up romantically involved. Of course, given the paucity of interracial on-screen romances in the cinema of the era, it seems likely that the studio dictated the pair should remain platonic. Still, Murphy plays a real warmth and sincerity with Jenny, particularly when telling her about Mickey.

As played by Murphy, Foley is a different sort of 1980s action hero, one who gets what he wants not through violence or threat, but through wit and manipulation. There’s also something endearingly selfless about Foley, a sense that he really cares about other people. One of the movie’s best scenes involves Foley spinning an elaborate yarn to protect the two cops assigned to babysit him, Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Taggart (John Aston), from their boss Lieutenant Bogomil (Ronny Cox).

There is also a charge to Murphy’s performance here that bleeds through into Foley. Foley is a character out of his depth, thrown into the deep end. He’s a fast-talking police officer from Detroit, with an implied criminal past. He’s a working class hustler with a badge. However, Los Angeles is a very different kind of environment with a very different set of rules. It is wealthier, whiter and more insulated than the world that Axel knows. That culture shock is a large part of the film’s appeal.

Beverly Hills Cop works as well as it does because it really does feel like Foley is out of his element, and that the success or failure of his plans will hinge entirely on his ability to improvise and adapt to a hostile environment. Murphy was in a very similar situation. This was a make-or-break moment for his career, and it was effectively a movie handed down from an actor with a very different set of skills. Murphy has acknowledged how “scary” the early screenings of Beverly Hills Cop were.

This might explain why none of the sequels have managed to capture that same magic. After all, Murphy did prove himself. Beverly Hills Cop was a huge success. It turned him into a star. It gave him the run of Paramount Pictures, as Tom Cruise would enjoy decades later. From that moment onwards, Murphy never needed anything as badly as he had needed Beverly Hills Cop to be hit. Then again, Foley could never really feel like a fish out of water in Beverly Hills again.

The Beverly Hills Cop sequels inevitably take a lot of the charm out of the original, as Axel ceases to be a stranger in a strange land. By the start of Beverly Hills Cop 2, Axel is fishing buddies with Lieutenant Bogomil and knows his daughter Jan (Alice Adair). Directed by Tony Scott, Beverly Hills Cop 2 feels much more like a generic 1980s action movie. Axel is reintroduced wearing an expensive suit and driving a Ferrari GTS. He’s no longer the scrappy outsider.

Beverly Hills Cop 2 features multiple references to the size of Axel’s manhood. Between the credits for Eddie Murphy’s production company and Tony Scott as director, Axel takes a moment to adjust his pants with the camera focused squarely on his crotch. At the end of the film, he jokes that Taggart and Rosewood are coming to resemble him and will one day have “big dicks and all.” When Axel whips out a real gun at a laser target range, he feels much more like a Schwarzenegger protagonist.

Owing to his fame and success, Murphy no longer had anything to prove. He was the driving creative force on the films. This is perhaps most obvious in his relationship with John Landis, who had directed him in Trading Places. Shortly after Trading Places, Landis oversaw a segment of The Twilight Zone which involved a horrific accident that led to the death of Victor Morrow and two children. Murphy petitioned Paramount to hire Landis to direct his vehicle, Coming to America.

“I wanted to help out Landis,” Murphy told Playboy. “I figured I’d give the guy a shot because his career was fucked. But he wound up fucking me.” The production was tumultuous. In press for Coming to America, Murphy was asked if there was going to be a third collaboration between actor and director. He replied, “Vic Morrow has a better chance of working with Landis than I do.” Ironically, Murphy would bring Landis back to direct Beverly Hills Cop 3.

Landis’ account of production illustrates that the energy that Murphy brought to the original film was gone. Murphy was a star. He had nothing to prove. He demonstrated the same sort of ego as action stars like Stallone. Much like Stallone, Murphy was uncomfortable with the amount of comedy in the film. “You know, John… Axel Foley is an adult now,” he reportedly told Landis. “He’s not a wiseass anymore.” In the years since, Murphy has acknowledged being embarrassed by Foley’s iconic laugh.

The original Beverly Hills Cop is a testament to the power of a hungry movie star to transform the film around them, to channel their own unique strengths in a way that elevates a fairly standard template. However, the sequels are a cautionary tale about what happens when such a movie star no longer has anything to prove.