Eddie Murphy as Detective Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop (1984). Photo / Getty Images
Eddie Murphy and the original cast are back for a Netflix sequel. They reveal the secrets of the Eighties hit.
Hollywood would have been a much duller place were it not for Sylvester Stallone and his desire for better erections. The story goes that, in the 1980s, the producer Don Simpson was driving through ritzy Beverly Hills in a beaten-up car when he was pulled over by the police because he looked out of place. That gave Simpson and his partner Jerry Bruckheimer their fish-out-of-water idea for 1984′s Beverly Hills Cop and, when looking for someone to play the gritty Detroit detective stuck out in glitzy Los Angeles, they opted for the biggest action star around — Stallone.
Stallone, though, wanted to go down the more standard action movie route, pushing the film to places Simpson didn’t want to go. The star refused to change his version, so to break the impasse Simpson told him about a treatment in Switzerland that injected sheep hormones to boost tumescence. According to a very gossipy book, High Concept by Charles Fleming, Simpson got Stallone to the top of the list for a clinic and off he went, quitting Beverly Hills Cop in favour of a future of mutton-enhanced manhood. Is it true? Well, it was the 1980s.
In Stallone’s place as the lead character, Axel Foley, came Eddie Murphy, then 21 — a very different star, best known for the subversive humour of Saturday Night Live. The script was ripped up, lines added by Sam Simon, who later produced The Simpsons. The blockbuster was an action comedy now, and the industry never looked back. The box-office success of Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel paved the way for the tough, comedic thrillers that dominated the 1980s and 1990s, from Lethal Weapon to Bad Boys, via most films Arnold Schwarzenegger made – before superheroes infantilised everything.
And now, in big news for people of a certain age who want a film to watch at home with their Friday night takeaway, Foley is back — in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, on Netflix. It is a deliberate, loving rehash of the first movie as Foley (Murphy, 63) travels to Beverly Hills to battle criminals. Also returning are his cop sidekicks, John Taggart (John Ashton, 76) and Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold, 67). Finally, taking the average age down a peg, are Taylour Paige (33) as Foley’s daughter and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (43) as a policeman.
I talk to Bruckheimer from Silverstone, where the unstoppable icon is making a Formula 1 film with Brad Pitt. I ask, simply, what makes a good Beverly Hills Cop film, to which he bluntly replies: “Eddie Murphy!” He adds that Murphy hasn’t been in many movies “for 15 years” and he is right — after a leftfield turn in the comedy Bowfinger in 1999, and a series of commercial failures, Murphy has mostly been the donkey in Shrek. So this feels a comeback for, as Bruckheimer puts it, “one of the great US comedians”.
Could the producer have imagined, in 1984, that his film would still be talked about 40 years later? “Not a chance,” he says. “When it came out there was a Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood film called City Heat out that we thought would kill us. And the conventional wisdom was no African-American actor could carry a movie by himself, so there was pressure. But it exploded. You never know. The audience is far smarter than us. If we knew what we were doing, every movie would be a hit.”
Is it odd, though, that Bruckheimer, whose Top Gun: Maverick saved cinemas after Covid, is putting this film straight on TV? “You know, there’s the conversation about a fight between streaming and cinemas,” he says, shrugging. “But my view is that the more things we get to make, the better. If it’s on your phone? It doesn’t matter.”
Reinhold was originally plucked for the role of Rosewood off the back of the cult high school comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). He was in place before Murphy — when Stallone was attached.
“Eddie’s always the catalyst,” Reinhold says, from his house in New Mexico. “But I don’t consider myself a straight man — a straight man is not funny. My job is to react to Eddie in a funny way, and it was a compliment to me when Marty Brest [the director of the first film] said, ‘You listen funny.’
“If you watch the first film, whenever I put my hands in my pockets when Eddie’s talking, it is so I wouldn’t ruin the take. I would squeeze my thigh really hard, to the point I bruised.”
Beverly Hills Cop gave Reinhold a career — and the occasional free ride. He says the real Beverly Hills Police Department didn’t know what to make of the first film — some crew were followed home by the police in a “pretty explicit message” not to mess with them, but, after the film, money was allocated to the department. They changed their minds then.
“And so I haven’t had many tickets in Beverly Hills since,” Reinhold says, laughing. “One guy actually said, ‘I can’t give you a ticket, even though you richly deserve it. Because we have new facilities as a result of your movie!’”
This legacy is felt throughout the new film. And, yes, the Harold Faltermeyer synth theme Axel F is back too. A few years ago Reinhold was in Santorini when a man on his donkey ambled past. The man’s phone rang. It was the Axel F theme.
“And another time,” Reinhold continues, filled with enthusiasm, “I was in the Navajo reservation and I met this ancient man in his hogan, which is like an igloo. I was invited in and the man had so many wrinkles. He looked like a topographical map. But he looked at me and said, very quietly … ‘Beverly Hills Cop.’”
Mark Molloy, the director of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, is in his office, with a promotional poster for the original film behind him. “I’ve always had it,” he protests when I ask if it is just there for promo. “And one for the second film.” Not the third? “I’ve never seen number three.” Yes, a third film, without Bruckheimer, was made in 1994. It is derided in a scene with Murphy in the new film with the line: “Not your finest hour.”
So what, I ask Molloy, makes these films work? “It’s a blend,” he explains. “It was one of the first action comedies where stakes are real but it has to be funny. I wanted to make a 1980s action comedy, which is grounded but has escapism too. And we never spoke about a version that wasn’t R-rated. It has to be R-rated [unsuitable for children].”
Also new to the film are Gordon-Levitt (who was three when the original was released) and Paige (who was born in 1990).
“Watching Beverly Hills Cop when I was little holds a special place in my psyche,” Gordon-Levitt says about the franchise the pair have joined. “I had a brother, six-and-a-half years older than me, and the things older siblings like take on a mystic, grown-up, forbidden danger. It made me laugh and feel cool alongside him.” His brother, Daniel, died in 2010. He was just 36.
Paige came to Murphy through his outrageous, multipart comedy The Nutty Professor. She watched it about 200 times and, when she met the man who would play her father, she did impressions of his Professor Sherman Klump.
What does she think of when she thinks about that decade? “Whenever I listen to, say, Kate Bush or Michael Jackson,” she says, “I ask people who were there, ‘Did the Eighties feel like this song?’ And they always say yes. Puffy sleeves, neon, hair. There was energy. ‘Let’s dance it out!’”
Five years ago there was a party for Bruckheimer. Tom Cruise was there, of course, and so was Murphy — two actors whose films have brought in about US$18 billion of box-office revenue between them, helping to shape cinema in the 1980s and build the multiplexes still just about there today.
Ashton was at the party as well. His detective John Taggart was the cynical core of the best Beverly Hills Cop moments and, suitably, the actor lives some distance away from Hollywood now, in Colorado. He liked seeing Murphy at the lavish LA bash — “Eddie’s a very quiet, calm guy off camera. We get along great.” Do they stay in touch? “Well, I’m the kind of guy who goes to work, then goes home to play golf. Eddie has a very different lifestyle.”
He laughs, but this contrast is why Beverly Hills Cop works. “I just don’t get comedy these days,” Ashton says. “Actors should play a scene seriously, but let the situation be funny. If you play it funny, I don’t think it’s funny.” Which is this genre in a nutshell — Ashton is serious, Reinhold is a reactor, Murphy is electric — three leads with a combustible chemistry, brought together because Stallone had other priorities.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is on Netflix from today.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
The magical world of Oz, where you can expect the unexpected. Watch the new #WickedMovie trailer now. Video / Universal Pictures