Tag: Eddie Murphy

Beverly Hills Cop (1984, Martin Brest)

Beverly Hills Cop opens with a montage of Detroit street scenes. Kids playing, people talking, walking, Black and white. It’s beautifully cut—even at its most tediously cop action movie procedural, the editing is always glorious (though there’s lots of technical magnificence in Cop—and is well-done enough you even forgive the film for Glenn Frey’s The Heat is On. The thing about really tightly chosen soundtracks is when a song doesn’t fit the characters, and Glenn Frey is definitely not what Eddie Murphy’s Detroit super-cop puts on the stereo hi-fi. It’s okay enough. And the montage is excellent.

But it’s nothing compared to the first action sequence, which has a cigarette smuggler wreaking havoc in a stolen truck on the streets of Detroit, all the cops in pursuit, Murphy swinging around the back of the trailer, The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” blaring, every shot cut perfectly to the music. It’s mesmerizing. And director Brest makes sure to show off Murphy’s reaction shots. After that opening scene with the cops arriving to set off the truck chase, the entire movie is pretty much watching Murphy figure out the story. Brest just sets the camera on him and waits for Murphy to lead the scene to its finish with his deliveries and expressions. So when Lisa Eilbacher is just staring at him on the job, waiting for him to find the next clue, it makes perfect sense. He’d be just as transfixing to the people around him.

Brest directs Cop with a spotlight on Murphy, leveraging Bruce Surtees’s very grim and gritty photography (even for an action movie) and Murphy’s ability to make the comedy work. Because everyone’s Murphy’s sidekick in a series of sketches. Well, until the third act. And it’s sluggish through the second act when Murphy teams up with Beverly Hills cops and buzzkills John Ashton and Judge Reinhold. The movie takes a while to really loose Ashton and Reinhold as a comedy duo—they’ve got a whole slapstick number at one point, with Harold Faltermeyer’s scorekeeping the energy up until they’re able to take it through unfunny into a good gag. And the last one before the big action finale.

It’s a decent big action finale, with Murphy able to deliver the thriller goods while Ashton and Reinhold take over the comedy. There are a lot of reasons Beverly Hills Cop could never get made today, not least of which being if a bunch of white guys with assault weapons are shooting at a Black man (even one with two white friends) on their Beverly Hills estate… would the cops even show up? Cop ages rather strangely. Starting with none of the white cops just shooting Murphy when they don’t recognize him. It’s uncomfortably optimistic.

But there’s also the Beverly Hills angle. Cop’s able to treat it as an absurd foreign land, where every car is a Mercedes, every person white but polite, and the cops tattle on each other for infractions. It leads to a lot of funny scenes. Murphy, Brest, and Cop can get quite a bit of material from it. The big changeover in tone comes after the strip club scene, which isn’t the worst eighties action movie strip club scene, but it’s still utterly pointless. Cop doesn’t have female characters—Eilbacher’s art gallery director is only female because they wouldn’t have been able to sell a straight male art gallery director. She and Murphy don’t have any romantic chemistry; they’re just old friends. The first act of Cop is very much about old friends. And it’s definitely not about girls. If you look in the end credits, it’s Eilbacher then fifteen guys (and only one Black guy) before you get to the next female character. Murphy spends the entire time in the strip club flirting with the waitress, and there’s not even a reaction shot. Cop’s about boys.

To be incredibly fair to it and what they pull off: Beverly Hills Cop takes place over four days, three of them consecutive, and there’s only dull moment is trying to figure out if Bronson Pinchot is intentionally stalling the scene. Brest and the editors time everyone else in the movie with Murphy, but Pinchot against him, and it’s almost like a dig to make Pinchot more unlikable. Like maybe he was actually too likable, and they screwed it up for a laugh. But the laugh is he’s foreign and an art gallery clerk.

Paul Reiser does better in his bit part as Murphy’s Detroit sidekick, but he’s really just there to dump exposition and set up jokes.

The best supporting performance is probably Ronny Cox as the Beverly Hills captain. He’s got the least to do in terms of action but the most character while doing it. Then probably Steven Berkoff’s off-putting but successful villain. Then Eilbacher holds her own against everyone and helps maintain Murphy’s energy even when he’s in Beverly Hills. Ashton and Reinhold are both good, likable, funny. Reinhold’s got a couple long comedy bits, but they eventually pay off enough. Brest doesn’t care to showcase anyone else. He just wants to watch Murphy, which makes sense because Murphy’s almost indescribably good. Nonpareil. It’s a profoundly successful showcase (and very unfortunate he and Brest never teamed up again); Beverly Hills Cop is no crappy blue Chevy Nova; it’s the perfect star-making vehicle.

The great technicals just make it better. Cop’s unimaginable looking different from Surtees’s contrast heavy but still muted photography or playing differently than how Arthur Coburn and Billy Weber cut it. Not to mention the Faltermeyer score. Or the often great soundtrack (Patti LaBelle contributes the two other big songs, not Frey).

And Brest’s direction is excellent. The film’s a singular success.

48 Hrs. (1982, Walter Hill)

About seventy minutes into 48 Hrs., Nick Nolte apologizes to Eddie Murphy for the racial slurs he’s been calling him since Murphy showed up in the movie. Nolte’s just doing his job, he explains, “keeping him down,” which is an unintentionally honest moment about cops and Black men. Murphy nods to it, but says, “that doesn’t explain all of it,” and Nolte sadly agrees. He’s just a racist White cop. There’s only so much he can do.

At this point in the film, Nolte and Murphy are buddies. 48 Hrs. is an eighties buddy cop movie after all. Even if the first act is a bad but mildly amusing riff on a Dirty Harry movie, introducing hard-living rogue copper Nolte, who just happens to have a sophisticated girlfriend, Annette O’Toole. O’Toole’s pointless in the film, which ends up being fine because the movie’s literally got nothing for her. She gets maybe one good line—which isn’t bad for the supporting cast; outside Nolte and Murphy, not many good lines in the film… you’d think with four screenwriters on it and at least three of them desperate to be iconic, there’d be some good lines thrown around.

Not really. In fact, when O’Toole gets hers’, it’s a surprise because it’s on the end of a bad conversation. The writing on O’Toole and Nolte is awful. Somehow they’re likable together, but not because of anything in the dialogue. Or maybe the scene where much shorter than Nolte O’Toole follows him down the hallway and it’s cute is an accident. 48 Hrs. is not successfully directed, so it’s hard to give Hill much credit other than keeping the trains running on time. Even if it does start really dragging at the end of the first hour, after Nolte and Murphy have just had a fistfight to kill time, followed by the threat of another fistfight.

So the movie opens with Sonny Landham breaking James Remar out of prison. He’s on a chain gang. Hill gets to pretend it’s Cool Hand Luke for a shot or two and the James Horner music is really, really good, but then things start to fall apart once Remar escapes and leaves a guard behind to call it in. The calling it in is a bunch of expository nonsense; 48 Hrs. frequently reminds of plot points in the first hour. It’s like the screenwriters were leaving notes for each other where to pick up. Not a smooth script. Not good dialogue script, not a smoothly paced script. Thank goodness for Eddie Murphy and Horner and cinematographer Ric Waite.

Nolte tags along on a routine call with Jonathan Banks, who’s great and sets a way too high standard for the cop acting in the movie, only they’re not prepared for Remar and Landham and Remar ends up with Nolte’s gun. So Nolte has to go get Eddie Murphy out of jail—Murphy and Remar used to do jobs together—so Murphy can help Nolte find Remar. That sequence of the film, outside Murphy’s introduction, isn’t good. It’s way too perfunctory and doesn’t do anything to transition affable tough jerk Nolte from the opening to the cruel racist who’s going to be berating Murphy for the next thirty or so minutes. If the film had just stuck to its convictions and had Nolte be as vocally racist as he appeared… it’d be taking a position on something. But those are questions for non-buddy cop movies so you get the laughs you can. The first turn for Nolte comes during Murphy’s big set piece in a redneck bar. It makes it seem like 48 Hrs. has its set pieces down… but then the fistfight in the streets because the guys are tired is a few scenes later and it’s clear the movie’s got no idea.

The second act ends with a bad chase sequence in a subway station, but at least Hill’s got to try because there’s so much going on, followed by a song montage with Murphy dancing with a girl and Nolte driving through San Francisco to meet him to kick off the third act, which quickly leads to a stole bus sequence, then there’s the big Chinatown finale. So much action. And all of it middling or worse.

During the Chinatown chase sequence, it’s obviously not the three editors’ fault—though earlier some things are definitely their faults—it’s Hill not knowing how to direct the sequence.

Hill’s… a peculiar director for the film. He’s humorless, he’s got terrible instincts with performances: Nolte’s never good, just more mediocre at times than bad, Remar’s disappointing, David Patrick Kelly’s annoying, Brion James’s annoying–Frank McRae’s yelling police captain is worth walking out of the movie on—other than Murphy… nobody’s actually good. McRae and James aren’t in the movie very much and shouldn’t able to mess it up, but they do. Banks and O’Toole get off easy with “too small” roles.

The James Horner score keeps it interesting for the first forty or so minutes, until the way the movie positions Murphy and Nolte gets a little more tolerable, Ric Waite’s photography is good enough in the first act you wonder what happened later on. There are a lot of obvious insert shots in 48 Hrs.—McRae doesn’t even appear to be in the same room with the other actors in his big scene—and they never match. Technically, 48 Hrs. asks for a lot of indulgence. The music’s not good enough to cover it all.

I mean, the San Francisco scenery does do quite a bit of the lifting. I’m not sure the movie could get away being so thin anywhere else.

It’s ostensibly a Nolte vehicle, which starts as a fine one, turns into a terrible one, but then turns into an adequate one for Murphy. Not all of Murphy’s scenes are good. Maybe a quarter of them fail. But the successful ones are big hits.