So this movie was on television last night and driven by an urge to indulge in the laziness of not bothering to change the channel I watched for the first time in almost 20 years.
Now, I remember very well that in 1984, this movie was the shit. Eddy Murphy. That music. It got an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Two Golden Globes nominations, one for best comedy and one for best comedy actor.
Twenty years ago, however, I wasn’t impressed. It’s a comedy but it’s not actually funny. There’s an intrigue but, honestly, nothing more captivating than what you’d find on Columbo or Perry Mason. That leaves us with car chases and Hugh Hefner.
Maybe twenty years ago I was too young. Maybe there was an ineffable quality that I couldn’t grasp. Apparently no. Yesterday it was still just as boring as it was the first time around.
How did this flick become successful? Sure, Eddy Murphy was a huge star but that was in part because of Beverly Hills Cop. Metro was another completely forgettable Murphy vehicle, but unlike BHC, it rightfully bombed. Why?
Ah crap, I watched the sequel thinking it was the first one. However, it’s telling that both movies had so utterly vanished from my memory that I wasn’t able to tell them apart. So the question still stands: what was so great about either movies?
The first one is still pretty good–nice soundtrack, loyal outsider cop vs. complacent police system plot, offbeat turns by Judge Reinhold and Steven Berkoff, some good mugging by Murphy himself. The second one still sucks.
BHC didn’t make him well known, but that movie did about 225 Million, compared to 90 Million for Trading Places. It made him huge.
It’s #38 of all time highest grossing movies adjusted for inflation.
BHC was HUGE, and I think it’s still funny, still Eddie Murphy’s best movie. Great blend of comedy and action. Blows away Trading Places and 48 Hours. There was no other movie really like it at the time. . .it’s very much in the Phillip Marlowe vein. But filthier. The dynamic created by the hang-loose black cop from Detroit, the by-the-book John Ashton and “still hasn’t figured it all out” Judge Reinhold is hilarious.
Who’s that? The old girlfriend who works in the art gallery? The one who’s so hot that I can’t remember her name and am not sure she ever worked again? The one who delivered her lines by Pony Express?
If a truly hot chick HAD played that part, I tell you this, BHC would have been my most favorite movie of all time, or at least that decade.
Now you’ve got me thinkin’ (always dangerous)–who was a totally hot babe in 1984 who might have gotten cast in that part? I’m going to go with Demi Moore.
Bronson Pinchot’s art gallery scene still gets me. Oh, and the part where Murphy’s cracking up at the Michael Jackson jackets. Very fresh, at the time.
Beverly Hills Cop was Murphy’s first solo lead; before that, he was paired up with known actors (Nick Nolte, Dan Ackroyd), although one can argue even then that Murphy dominated the screen. Murphy’s appearance in Best Defense was little more than a cameo, intended to prop up a painfully unfunny Dudley Moore vehicle. It’s not really his fault that the thing was an unpolished turd.
As for Beverly Hills Cop (the original one), it was, like Bullitt, a high water mark at the time, but a combination of imitators in the action-comedy-drama genre and better movies (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, True Lies) have made it pale in comparison. It was definitely a film of the 'Eighties, and Murphy’s mugging schtick hasn’t really aged all that well. It comes off as kind of mediocre now. The sequels, of course, were even worse, with most of the humor derived from satirizing the original film, which is always a bad sign (see the Indiana Jones films.)
Murphy is an example of a talented actor who started reading too much of his own press and became a self-parody and willing to take any role for cash. His recent image retooling as Fred MacMurray’s successor hasn’t really engendered any respect from me, either. He was easily the funniest thing on Saturday Night Live in the Doumanian era.