The ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ Legacy Is More Problematic Than You Remember

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F hits streaming with, if not outright high anticipation, definitely a modicum of good will. The latest entry in the long-dormant franchise sees superstar Eddie Murphy returning as slick talking Detroit cop Axel Foley, and it’s understandable that fans would be eager to see Murphy don the old Detroit Lions jacket and get the ol’ Beverly Hills band back together for a victory lap on Netflix . But 2024 also marks 30 years since the classic original Beverly Hills Cop —a movie that Murphy himself recently dubbed the first Black blockbuster. That legacy is indisputably important, even if that legacy is as complicated as contemporary Hollywood’s handling of race in the years since it hit theaters.

“Before Beverly Hills Cop , there had never been a movie that starred a Black man, Black person, that was successful all around the world,” Murphy told Extra . “Even still, to this day, when Black folks, we, make movies, most of the time they work in the States and outside of the country–they don't work.”

Murphy isn’t wrong about Beverly Hills Cop as a boundary-shattering moment in Black cinema. Starring a 23-year old Murphy as the motormouth Foley, it was a fish-out-of-water action comedy about a Detroit detective suddenly in Beverly Hills to solve a childhood friend’s murder. Murthy’s star had been steadily rising since he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live as an untested 19-year-old in 1980.

He’d broken through as a movie star with 1982s 48 Hrs and followed it up with Trading Places –another smash a year later. By 1984, Eddie Murphy was red-hot and Beverly Hills Cop would send his career into the stratosphere, making Murphy the darling of Paramount Pictures. He’d become the studio’s most bankable brand this side of Star Trek .

Paramount was infatuated with Eddie, (the studio famously signed the star to a near-exclusive deal beginning in the mid-1980s), but it’s easy to see, in certain patterns that became common in many of his ’80s hits, that studios were also still very skittish about a Black leading man in big mainstream movies.

In that early string of hit movies , he was often the sole Black major character sharing the screen with mostly white co-stars; it was a dynamic that indicated studios were consciously trying to avoid these films being seen as “Black movies” in spite of their charismatic Black leading man. In Beverly Hills Cop , Axel Foley has no love interest—merely a conspicuously flirtatious “friendship” with Lisa Eilbacher’s character, Jenny Summers. And it wasn’t an anomaly: Eddie didn’t have a love interest in Trading Places or 48 Hrs , save for a brief tryst with a party girl played by future Miami Vice star Olivia Brown near the end of 48 Hrs . Murphy wouldn’t have a romantic foil until Charlotte Lewis as Kee Nang in 1986s mystical action/adventure flick The Golden Child . The messaging was clear: in terms of movie marketing, centering a Black romance makes it a “Black movie”—and featuring an interracial relationship in a would-be blockbuster makes it a hot potato.

Immediately after 1987s Beverly Hills Cop 2 , Murphy pivoted to making Black movies with their Blackness very much out front. With 1987’s masterful Coming to America , he presented a depiction of African royals; Harlem Nights featured a who’s-who of Black comedy icons as debonair hustlers from the 1940s; and 1992’s Boomerang was a look at young Black urban professionals—years before films like The Best Man made buppie rom-coms trendy.

He collaborated with Black comedy’s burgeoning vanguard of Robert Townsend and Keenan Ivory Wayans; shared the screen with comics he’d inspired like Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence and a young Dave Chappelle. And he worked with a who’s-who of Black actresses from Jasmine Guy and Jada Pinkett to Theresa Randle, Halle Berry and Robin Givens. It was almost as if ’90s Eddie Murphy stood in deliberate contrast to his early onscreen self.

It’s worth noting that this period also featured Murphy’s first real critical backlash, as white commentators felt cheated that the star was no longer delivering Axel Foley-esque hijinks and was now embracing his status as a Black leading man—and a romantic lead, no less. He was also flexing his status as one of the biggest names in Hollywood—getting the kind of movies made that studios had shown little interest in making before Murphy started asserting his influence as an A-lister. He even directed Harlem Nights himself, something that made Murphy a prime target for critics eager to take the newly-minted Hollywood power player down a peg.

For all of the success he’d brought to Paramount Pictures and for all his success has done to refashion the image of the Black movie star, Hollywood was still very uncomfortable with what Eddie Murphy dared to be. perennial viral video is a clip of Murphy on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno circa 1992 criticizing former Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan, who felt Boomerang ’s advertising industry backdrop was unrealistic because it featured Black characters in a corporate setting without white people.

Even director John Landis, who’d directed Murphy in the beloved Trading Places and Coming to America , griped about Murphy when they reunited for the misbegotten Beverly Hills Cop 3 in 1994.

Landis told Collider in 2005:

Cop 3 was a very strange experience.; The script wasn’t any good, but I figured, “So what?; I’ll make it funny with Eddie.”; I mean, one of the worst scripts I ever read was [the original] Beverly Hills Cop.; It was a piece of shit, that script.; But the movie’s very funny because Eddie Murphy and Martin Brest made it funny.; And with Bronson Pinchot… that was all improvised.; Everything funny in that movie is not in the screenplay, so I thought, “Well, we’ll do that.”; But then I discovered on the first day when I started giving Eddie some shtick, he said, “You know, John… Axel Foley is an adult now.; He’s not a wiseass anymore.”; It turned out… I believe he was very jealous of Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes doing these [straight roles].; If you notice, after Beverly Hills Cop 3 he did like four action movies.; So, with Beverly Hills Cop 3 , I had this strange experience where he was very professional, but he just wasn’t funny.; I would try to put him in funny situations, and he would find a way to step around them.; It’s an odd movie.; There are things in it I like, but it’s an odd movie.

Landis seemed to not acknowledge the uncomfortable position Murphy’s early success had put him in. In the mid-1980s, he largely stood alone as a Black actor who was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. The discomfort of being the grinning Black guy with the trademark “hyuk-hyuk” laugh could’ve become a prison. Even a legend like Richard Pryor couldn’t escape big studio films reducing him to a bumbling caricature at a certain point; movies like The Toy and Superman III neutered the comedy icon of his trademark edge. It’s not hard to believe that Eddie’s dapper turn in the early ’90s wasn’t just a reaction to the Denzels of the world—it was also him determining his own fate in a sea of white would-be puppeteers.

Beverly Hills Cop, as the first Black blockbuster, opened the doors for superstars like Wesley Snipes and Will Smith to vault onto Hollywood’s A-list in the 1990s—and names like Kevin Hart and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson later. But it’s telling that, even when notable Black folks break ground, systemic racism demands that they repeat the trick. Smith became the most bankable actor in Hollywood, yet he had to take a route similar to Eddie’s from a decade prior: mostly playing the lone wisecracking, perpetually cool Black guy in movies where he was surrounded by stiff white guys.

Of course, conversely, Smith’s big screen breakout had come via 1995’s Bad Boys , a movie that featured two Black male leads (but yet another chaste interaction with the white female lead—this time Téa Leoni) —a hit that should’ve proven that big “buddy” action movies don’t have to have a white foil alongside a Black star a la Nick Nolte with Eddie in 48 Hrs or Mel Gibson and Danny Glover’s Lethal Weapon franchise. It’s bittersweet that the Bad Boys franchise, like Beverly Hills Cop , was resurrected this year; Smith walked the trail that Murphy blazed when the latter all but invented the buddy cop genre in the 1980s. The box office success of Bad Boys: Ride Or Die is being hailed as a cineplex savior following what has been a lean movie summer thus far—but will its success, with Smith and co-star Martin Lawrence front-and-center, make studios more embracing of big Black movies?

Obviously, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F isn’t at the box office, but it should be a victory lap. Murphy has more than earned it and …Axel F has enough heart, wit and enthusiasm to win over most cynics. If it charms audiences and is a hit for Netflix (which it should be), the film will be proof that even old franchises can find new life. If not—it won’t hurt Eddie much. But when examining the legacy and influence of these movies, as we marvel at the talent and longevity of Mr. Murphy, let’s also cast a disparaging eye at an industry that keeps needing Black stardom to prove something. Eddie beat the box office decades ago; Will and Martin just breathed new life into it. Black movies no longer have anything to prove.

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