Editor’s note: This review originally appeared in the June 1, 1987 issue of New York. We’re republishing it to mark the release of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F this week.
One of the many virtues of Beverly Hills Cop was that the picture took its time. Director Martin Brest gave the material an eccentric, leisurely tempo, with lots of space for little character bits, jokes, atmosphere. The movie meandered — gracefully. But producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer no longer seem willing to allow that kind of personal filmmaking. Everything S&B makes now has the same hypertense attack. For the sequel, Beverly Hills Cop II, they hired the excruciatingly pragmatic Tony Scott, who did Top Gun for them. Scott is interested only in phony, whipped-up excitement: Every time anyone drives anywhere, cars get smashed; one sequence bangs into the next without logic; people shoot off big guns in mocking imitation of Rambo.
Scott keeps things moving so fast that all you really take in is the whirring speed, not what’s happening. When the footage is edited with very rapid cuts, just as in commercials (which Scott used to direct), the audience gets sprayed in the face with bullets. Some people like that; it improves their circulation. I hate it. I also hated the other ways the filmmakers coarsened the material. The sexual attitudes here are brazenly, stupidly retrograde: Women are either bitches or twitches. Busty young girls shake themselves silly in a topless bar and at a Playboy-mansion party. Beverly Hills Cop was rather hip, but this is the kind of movie in which Hugh Hefner makes an appearance in order to display his integrity.
Though Eddie Murphy still hustles and puts people on, it’s become impossible to think of his street-smart Detroit cop, Axel Foley, as an outsider in America’s richest, flossiest community. Murphy seems utterly at home anywhere. He’s the star, the gravy train, and everyone in the movie treats him as a king. Perhaps Murphy’s phenomenal earning power has dissolved his ability to play a role. He is simply the gloating center of everything, feasting on the attention. But at least he doesn’t look vacant and bored, as he did in The Golden Child. His eyes are alive again, and he’s volatile and resourceful. He has some great moments snapping his fingers in the faces of thick-headed criminals — his hand movements dazzle. He’s still funny, but it’s a shame to see him so utterly easy: As an actor, there’s nothing left for him to discover but further proofs of his own greatness.