Editor’s note: This review originally appeared in the December 10, 1984, issue of New York. We’re republishing it to mark the release of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F this week.
Eddie Murphy is an example of democratic man stretched to his limits. Like many entertainers, he has an instinct for what the audience will embrace as the central response to any situation — he knows how to position himself at the center of our emotions so that we see ourselves in him. As I say, many entertainers can do it — that part of what makes them stars. But Murphy has his specialty. He talks. Words fall from him in flashing torrents, more words that we can take in, more work than the situation needs. What’s so funny about him is the way he overwhelms everyone, even himself sometimes, with his incredible gift of gab. The words come so fast that they immediately create a new situation, leaving everyone, mouths gaping, in the rear. As they — and we — struggle to catch up. Murphy opens his mouth as wide as a donkey’s and emits that peculiar, heavy, bathtub-drain laugh. The first time I heard it, I thought that laugh was pure malice. But, of course, it isn’t. Eddie Murphy has a broad, generous streak. He wants the world to be a faster place; he wants everyone to be a little hipper.
In Beverly Hills Cop, Murphy plays a young Detroit police officer, Alex Foley, who travels to Los Angeles to investigate the murder of a buddy. Foley is way, way out of his jurisdiction, and he’s constantly in trouble with the Beverly Hills police, a scrupulous and polite bunch of law-enforcement gentlemen, but he runs circles around them. As always, Murphy’s mouth can take him anywhere. That he’s young, Black, obscure, and dressed in a high-school phys-ed-department sweatshirt doesn’t hurt him one bit: He’s so aware of the way he fits into the society that he can turn his low status to his own advantage. At the registration desk of an expensive fully booked hotel, he raised such a ruckus about the hotel’s alleged prejudice against “n–––” that the manager gives him a suite. Faced with the maître d’ of an expensive club, he becomes “Ramon,” diseased lover of a wealthy man lunching grandly within; rather than hear any more of Ramon’s confidences, the maître d’ lets him pass.
Murphy has the Black man’s intimate knowledge of what whites will give up to avoid a scene. He’s a master of embarrassment — he plugs right into it and makes it work for him. In many ways, Beverly Hills Cop is a conventional commercial movie: The renegade hero, doing everything by his own rules, is a familiar figure from old movies and such TV shows as The Rockford Files; the sinister villain, a millionaire who runs an art gallery (ah, those evil upper-class aesthetes), comes out of old Warner Bros. anti-Fascist melodramas. But Beverly Hills Cop, which was written by Daniel Petrie Jr. (his first screenplay) and directed by young Martin Brest (Going in Style), is very shrewd about race. It understands the exchange of aggression and guilt, and it’s witty about the awkward way that whites who have been taught to respect Blacks will speak and act when confronted with an actual Black man. Ronny Cox, who plays a lieutenant in the Beverly Hills force, looks at Murphy as if he were a problem to be solved by the application of discipline and reason. With Murphy in town, the other cops scramble just to stay afloat. Given colleagues like this, Foley reasons, a cop has to be a con artist. Murphy’s Axel Foley teaches his straight white partners to stop going by the book; the movie is about the way white organizational skill has to yield to Black street-smarts.
Of course, as any civil libertarian would point out, when white cops throw away the book, street Blacks are the first ones to suffer. But the movie has been packaged for easy laughs — it doesn’t work out the implications of what it says. The director, an NYU hotshot whose career almost foundered after Going in Style, has a nice, leisurely way with the material. Brest isn’t slick; he doesn’t worry about “pacing.” In the early Detroit scenes, he makes the squalid city and the murder of Foley’s friend a lot grittier than you’d expect. And when the picture moves to Beverly Hills, he captures the way a battle-scarred outsider would see the shopper’s paradise. Brest and screenwriter Petrie know that America is a comedy of clashing social types. Everyone Foley meets in Los Angeles is either bizarrely straight, or foreign, epicene, and insinuatingly friendly. Entering the art gallery owned by the slimy Mr. Big, Foley encounters Serge (Bronson Pichot), an émigré from somewhere with a baffling, silky manner and a curious accent. “What is it pertaining?” inquires Serge of Foley’s visit. Many of Murphy’s encounters have the eerie magic of habitants of two planets getting to know one another.
Brest gives all the actors a fine moment and then another. Judge Reinhold, as an overly genteel young detective whom Foley brings into the adult world, and John Ashton, as Reinhold’s surly, stubby older partner, carry a burden as big as Murphy’s through the second half of the picture. Will they loosen up enough to become good cops? It’s a peculiar question: Never has anyone as young as Eddie Murphy achieved comparable authority to decide what is hip and what is square. Murphy is borderline insufferable. He’s younger and smarter and nicer than anyone in the movie. Still, you can’t dislike him: He only wants other people to enjoy life as much as he does. It’s the hustler’s version of noblesse oblige.
