‘Beverly Hills Cop III’ at 30: A Uniquely Mirthless Entry in the Eddie Murphy Filmography

Axel Foley is back. Netflix so rarely snags a movie that feels like an event on par with the biggest theatrical releases, but Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, savvily titled to recall both Top Gun: Maverick and the world’s coolest cop theme, probably qualifies. More than a few people have wondered what kind of box office business a fourth, decades-later Beverly Hills Cop movie would do over the Independence Day weekend – though doing this involves doing something Netflix, Eddie Murphy, and any number of people would likely prefer: forgetting about the existence of Beverly Hills Cop III.

The Axel Foley threequel turned 30 this summer, and it’s no surprise that anniversary tributes failed to pour in. After the first Beverly Hills Cop performed so massively in its holiday 1984 release that it was still rocking the top five the following summer, its sequel broke opening weekend records in the summer of 1987. So imagine, by contrast, the spectacular anticlimax of Beverly Hills Cop III opening over Memorial Day weekend 1994, and getting its ass kicked by not just The Flintstones, but the second weekend of Maverick (the Mel Gibson cowboy comedy, not Top Gun 2). Those big, much-hyped summer hits weren’t the only ones outgunning Axel; Beverly Hills Cop III also made less money than Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Angels in the Outfield, City Slickers II (itself a major disappointment!), and, in a grimly fitting humiliation for the former Buckwheat, the Little Rascals remake.

Revisiting the movie, it’s easy to see why – and also surprisingly difficult to look away. Beverly Hills Cop III is a uniquely mirthless entry in the Eddie Murphy filmography, one that suffers immensely from being tethered to the machinery of a low-rent cop movie. To be honest, the first two Beverly Hills Cop installments are also low-rent cop movies at their core, but they benefit enormously from slick directors like Martin Brest and Tony Scott – and, more importantly, from Eddie Murphy happening to be one of the funniest guys on the planet. (Bowfinger, Coming to America, and 48 Hours are all a lot funnier, but those are movies with screenplays that were never earmarked for Sylvester Stallone.) Murphy’s no stranger to goosing mediocre material. He came up on Saturday Night Live, where that’s part of the job description. By the time of BHC3, Murphy was in a weird funk and not in a particularly funny mood. He gave interviews discussing how he wanted Axel to be more grown-up and less wisecracking this time around – as if he hoped to lean into everything that kinda sucked about the earlier movies.

This apparently meant pitting director John Landis’s preferred comedy of spectacle against Murphy’s seeming hatred of John Landis’s guts. More recently, Murphy called him “the great John Landis” ina Kelly Clarkson Show interview regarding Trading Places, and talked about how that was the most fun he ever made making a movie. That was part of why he hired Landis to direct Coming to America, which was apparently much less fun to make – featuring an on-set dust-up that caused Murphy to swear they’d never work together again. So maybe somehow having Landis back to inject some Blues Brothers-style dancing criminals, awkwardly chummy George Lucas cameos, clunky crowd cutaways, and a total lack of street-level grit into Beverly Hills Cop III proved less comforting than he had somehow hoped.

Or maybe Murphy was in the mood to punish himself, though it’s hard to imagine what would have brought him low; his most recent movies at the time were The Distinguished Gentleman, a relatively harmless neo-screwball disappointment, and Boomerang, a warm change-of-pace rom-com. So maybe it’s an old recurring Murphy problem: Some of his worst movies result from him giving in to the desire to be cool, rather than funny, while many of his best result from him casting off any movie-star vanity and acting really, really silly. The weird thing about Beverly Hills Cop III is that it makes Axel Foley neither particularly funny nor particularly cool. He’s just kind of a surly movie cop who says something mildly amusing every 10 or 15 minutes, rather than performing his trademark live-wire wisecracking. The result is a movie staged like a sitcom without a comedian.

Take the early scene where Axel goes to interview a suspect at the Disney-like theme park where much of the movie is set. Security won’t let him in without an expensive ticket, which seems like the perfect opportunity for Murphy to riff about theme park ripoffs or devise some other, clever way of gaining admittance to the park. Instead, he has Axel… complain about the price, and then pay it. Later on, Murphy dons a cartoon-elephant costume, and surely the man who played a cantankerous version of Gumby can make something funny out of this? Nope. Murphy doesn’t bother. There’s one wan scene where he tosses a bratty kid in a fountain. No funny lines, no escalation, and then an awkward moment where Murphy has to play a quasi-romantic scene while still wearing part of his bulbous costume, which he then ditches. It’s mystifying.

The true nadir of Murphy’s ’90s career is usually considered Vampire in Brooklyn, as it flopped even harder than BHC3 and immediately preceded his Nutty Professor comeback. But look, I’ve seen Vampire in Brooklyn, which Murphy supposedly did out of contractual obligation, and it’s much funnier, more interesting, and more engaged than anything in BHC3. (Honestly, I’d take it over Beverly Hills Cop II, too.) Vampire offers a glimpse of an Eddie Murphy who’s less interested in playing the brash comic hero, but still knows how to use his charisma and presence to command the screen. Beverly Hills Cop III offers a glimpse of Eddie Murphy who has seemingly no clue what else to do.

In more recent years, when Murphy doesn’t seem sure about what else to do, he simply sits out. After averaging a movie a year for the first 30 years of his career, the last decade has seen him only bringing out a new film every two or three. So it would be nearly impossible for Axel F, also known as Beverly Hills Cop IV, to feel as listless as its predecessor; Murphy must have actually wanted to make it. It is fascinating, though, to see how the new movie is trying to do some of the same stuff as III, only in a more crowd-pleasing way – not unlike how Sylvester Stallone cannibalized bits and pieces of the little-loved Rocky V in Rocky Balboa. (The odd dovetails between the two otherwise very disparate careers of Stallone and Murphy is probably worth exploring elsewhere.) The Axel Foley of the new movie is, indeed, less wisecracking and more grown-up, just as Murphy intended in III. He’s not a brash young man anymore, and there’s even an ah-the-hell-with-it worthy of Cop III: Faced with the opportunity to talk his way into a fancy hotel by claiming to be a magazine writer, as in the first film, Axel stops himself and just pays for a room.

But Axel F fakes it a lot better than Beverly Hills Cop III. It fakes the look – nowhere near the level of magic-hour sunsets of Tony Scott, but an occasional dusky glow – and it fakes the charm, even if Axel doesn’t feel automatically at odds with Beverly Hills snobs. It’s not a riotous instant classic, but it seems like Murphy probably at least nominally enjoyed himself in the moment and will be happy with the final product. That’s what makes Beverly Hills Cop III so awkwardly compelling: It offers a very different form of John Landis spectacle – that of an all-time electric movie star looking like he wants to be unplugged and left alone.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.