Editor’s note: This review originally appeared in the June 22, 1987, issue of New York. We’re republishing it to mark the release of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F this week.
Notes on a summer-season mega-hit: Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer have ruined my breakfast again. Not only is their terrible Beverly Hills Cop II a gigantic success, it is being celebrated throughout the media as an example of the right way to make movies. In the June 4 New York Times, Aljean Harmetz, the paper’s movie-business reporter, enunciates the lessons Hollywood has learned from the simultaneous success of Cop II and failure of Ishtar. The most important lesson: Bring movies under tight producer and studio control.
Great. Studio executives, some of whom can barely read a script, will not use Elaine May’s fecklessness as a way of discrediting the idea that the director makes the picture. These people might be right about May, but apart from keeping budgets down, what will a producer’s cinema accomplish? Most producers and studio executives are interested only in hits. Making hits, not good movies, is the way up the status ladder in Hollywood. (Some of the hits may also be decent movies, but they don’t have to be good for producers to climb.) As for Simpson and Bruckheimer, the producers of Flashdance, Top Gun, and the original Beverly Hills Cop have made it perfectly clear that merely controlling a movie doesn’t interest them. They want to realize their own ideas. But their ideas pulverize movies — they make the notion of movies as an art form impossible. And irrelevant.
As S&B have often said, the reason they are so adept at pleasing the audience is that they are the audience. They practice a kind of demagoguery in reverse — they give the audience what it wants, and that becomes the only thing they want. Unlike Stallone, who stumbled with Cobra and bombed out with Over the Top, Simpson and Bruckheimer don’t seem to have insulted moviegoers yet. But how much farther can people be pushed? Bev Hill Cop II is a slovenly, crude, and nasty movie. When Eddie Murphy is the star of a picture, people want to see it so badly that they may lose their capacity to get insulted.
Critics can’t slow the success of this sort of movie. Dreaming, or sloshed, a critic might imagine himself and his colleagues as powerful — as unacknowledged framers of the Law, sinewy wise men and women descending the Hollywood hills with engraved tablets: “Thou shalt not see Ishtar. Thou shalt see River’s Edge.†But in fact, few people decide what to see on the basis of reviews. Harmetz’s harping on the bad notices, as if to imply that Cop II is a success despite the critics, is misleading and beside the point: Critics have never determined the box-office fate of big-star, heavily promoted movies. Their function is quite different and, in commercial terms, much more modest. Critics enlarge the buzz of opinion that gathers around a new movie. They are makers not of the Law but of Talk. Some of the talk may influence Hollywood people at Oscar time or, more important, keep alive the reputation of a young director, actor, or writer. Apart from that, critics keep score and try to keep certain traditions alive. If a critic gets depressed when a terrible movie goes through the roof (and Cop II is arguably the worst movie ever to become a monster hit), the issue for him is less one of power than of morale. Most people who write about popular culture assume that the audience has both bad and good impulses. It can be reached at a low level, fooled, exploited, but it has a core of common sense and emotional responsiveness, and it rebounds. From Griffith and Chaplin to the Coppola of The Godfather, the great popular movie artists have always engaged, and then enlarged, the freest and most generous impulses of the audience — the savvy, the sympathy, the knowledge of how the world works, and ought to work, that are present in almost everyone.
The infamous “common denominator†can be low or high — it doesn’t have to be low, and certainly not “lowest.†Today, when something as broadly conceived and as good as E.T. or Platoon comes along, a huge audience responds to it. And will in the future. Without believing this at some level, a critic would box himself into a corner, projecting old Bergman movies against the wall.
A critic who believes in the audience doesn’t have an easy time acknowledging the popularity of movies like Beverly Hills Cop II. Reviewing the audience hardly seems part of his job; he would certainly prefer thinking of the audience as “us†than as “them.†When he thinks of it as “them,†he’s in the stuffy position of refusing to admit that he, too, may have patches of bad or questionable taste. After all, most everyone who loves movies has some sloppy, or at least easy, part of his soul, a genial province of sensibility. Vincent Canby adores “rude†slapstick comedies, and Richard Schickel has his square-shouldered, cornfield Americanism. Stanley Kauffmann gazes with pleasure into colorless pools of alienation; Pauline Kael gets excited over sexy or bloody movies that she thinks shock people; and David Edelstein has his twisty-headed horror pictures. I’m known as a softie for Moral Seriousness, and Andrew Sarris warms to movies featuring Mature Relationships between Civilized Men and Women. We’re all part of the audience for movies, bad ones as well as good.
Rather than risk sounding like elitists, critics find it easier simply to forget the audience and damn the bad movies and the people who make them. They are right to do so, but that’s not all there is to say. Stallone makes the movie — the audience makes it a hit.
And the audience making hits may not be as demanding as it once was. All critical judgment is comparative, and today’s audiences — especially teenagers, who dominate attendance figures — have been shortchanged of the means of making a comparison. Though no fault of their own, they are cut off from the movie past. With some exceptions (specialized cable stations, a PBS here or there), television stations are not broadcasting vintage American movies as often as they once did. Teenagers can’t easily see — as my generation could — the Hollywood studio product of the ’30s and ’40s. When broadcasters discovered that reruns of TV shows and made-for-TV movies earned higher ratings, they abandoned the old movies.
And young moviegoers may have trouble seeing good old films in college either. For the last decade or more, university film societies, denied subsidy and faced with higher rental costs, have stayed afloat by showing The Sting more often than The Magnificent Ambersons. At the same time, revival houses are closing all over the place, which leaves the local video-rental store as the principal source of the movie past. Some stores stock old movies in a serious way; the majority offer an arbitrary selection of “classics†or “nostalgia†items, mostly relegated to the bottom shelves.
The continuity of movie history, and movie appreciation, has been broken. So an audience that has never seen a Buster Keaton film or an action movie directed by Raoul Walsh or Allan Dwan can’t, perhaps, be expected to notice that Cop II is a brazen mess. Teenagers aren’t offended by the preposterously phony action sequences, in which shots are jammed together without relation in space. MTV and television commercials have accustomed them to nonstop pounding — to the impression of power produced by the bunching of visuals shocks and percussive music. Like rock videos, Simpson and Bruckheimer’s movies offer hyper-up moods rather than fully worked-out narratives. Unlike videos, they always offer the same mood: “The emotion of triumph,†Simpson calls it.
Not even sexual desire interrupts the high-torque adrenaline tip (Eddie Murphy is increasingly sexless). Nothing impedes the rush of winning, an emotion that is perhaps less what the characters feel than what Simpson and Bruckheimer feel in making movies for a huge audience. It’s true that Eddie Murphy pushes past social barriers, arguing his way through closed doors (closed to the audience too), but what people really celebrate at movies like Beverly Hills Cop II is the excitement of being part of a monster hit. The music, the tempo pull everybody in, and then the audience makes it happen. The movie, like an old disco single, is just a pretext. The movie is nothing.