Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

There's a moment early in Beverly Hills Cop where Axel Foley talks his way out of a situation that, by any reasonable logic, should have ended with him in handcuffs. He's fast, he's ridiculous, and he's completely convincing, and you realise within about five minutes that Eddie Murphy is doing something genuinely special here. The film around him is good fun. Murphy himself is something else entirely.

He plays Axel Foley, a Detroit cop who shows up in Beverly Hills chasing a personal vendetta and immediately starts treating the local police department like a slightly posh inconvenience. The fish-out-of-water setup is simple enough, but Murphy plays it with such infectious energy that you barely notice the mechanics. He improvises, he grins, he runs his mouth at exactly the right pitch between charming and infuriating. There's a bit involving a banana and a car exhaust pipe that's practically slapstick, and a scene in an art gallery where he absolutely should be thrown out but isn't, because it's Eddie Murphy and nobody on screen or off can quite bring themselves to stop watching him.

The action sits firmly in the 80s sweet spot where explosions are big, stunts are bouncy, and the whole thing moves fast enough that you don't stop to question any of it. There's an exploding fruit truck in the opening sequence that sets the tone perfectly: loud, joyful, not taking itself remotely seriously. And then there's Harold Faltermeyer's "Axel F" on the soundtrack, which is one of those pieces of music that has burned itself so permanently into pop culture that hearing it still feels like a little rush. The film is sun-drenched and stylish, and it knows it.

Where it stumbles, though, is in the one area where you'd expect a buddy-cop film to deliver. Because this is, in theory, a buddy-cop film, and yet it's almost entirely a one-man show. Judge Reinhold and John Ashton play the local cops who end up reluctantly helping Foley, and they're likeable enough, but they never become proper partners. You keep waiting for the dynamic to spark properly, for someone to genuinely match Foley's chaos or cut through it, and it just doesn't happen. I had a similar thought watching 48 Hrs., where Nick Nolte gives Murphy an actual wall to bounce off, and the friction between them is what makes the whole thing crackle. Beverly Hills Cop is missing that friction. Without it, Murphy is essentially doing a one-man show set against a procedural backdrop, and while he's good enough to make that work, you're always slightly aware of what's been left on the table.

It's a structural gap that the film's sheer momentum mostly papers over. The pace rarely sags, the comedy lands more often than not, and Murphy's performance is so committed and so watchable that you forgive the rest of it for not quite keeping up. But "forgive" is the right word. The sidekicks deserved better material. The villain plot is functional at best. And the whole thing has the slightly hollow feeling of a film that got lucky with its lead and didn't need to work as hard on anything else.

None of which stops it being enormously rewatchable. Put it on and you'll have a good time, no question. It's confident, it's funny, and it captures something about that particular mid-80s moment, all swagger and saxophone and Californian sunshine, that still feels like a genuine time and place. Three and a half stars.

It's just that with a stronger partner dynamic alongside Murphy, it could have been a proper classic rather than a very good vehicle for one extraordinary performance. As it stands, it's Axel Foley's show, start to finish. Lucky for the film that Axel Foley is brilliant company.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1984  | Watched: 2026-04-13

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