Latino Review got their hands on some inside information on Axel Foley’s next case, but be warned there are spoilers ahead!
With everything 1980’s being either made, remade, or re-imagined, one of our favorite readers and insiders who we haven’t heard from in a hot minute, EL CHAVO has the goods on Eddie Murphy’s 80’s update of Beverly Hills Cop 4. Written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, to be directed by Brett Ratner and produced by Lorenzo “Action Man” DiBonaventura (taking over for Jerry Bruckheimer), Beverly Hills Cop IV is slated to be released in 2010.
Here is the scoop: The studio loves the draft but Eddie Murphy is not too keen on it.
Released in 1984, the original Beverly Hills Cop grossed $316 million worldwide and spawned two sequels. All told, the three pics grossed $712.9 million worldwide. The last was released in 1994.
We are working on scoring details for other 1980’s sequels and remakes. In the meantime, El Chavo chimes in with his thoughts below…
It’s been 15 years since Axel Foley was last in Beverly Hills, and screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas needed a good reason to bring him back. That reason comes just a couple of pages into the latest script for Beverly Hills Cop IV (which calls itself Beverly Hills Cop 2009) – Judge Reinhold’s Billy Rosewood takes a leap out the 20th story of the Los Angeles Police HQ. When Axel hears that his former partner and best buddy became sidewalk salad he knows it wasn’t a suicide and he flies to Beverly Hills to get all the facts for himself.
I thought that Beverly Hills Cop 2009 would be a Bad Boys II style movie with all endless car chases and explosions. Brandt and Haas keep it all old school for the most part though, with a small shoot out and chase in the opening and then no more action for like 50 pages until Axel gets into a small fistfight with some East LA gangbangers. Unfortunately, a lot of the shit in the middle is way boring. The whole problem with another Beverly Hills Cop movie is that the basic idea that Axel Foley is this rough and tumble Detroit cop who is a fish out water in upscale Beverly Hills is played out. He’s done a lot of time in Beverly Hills. In this movie they mention that they teach his cases at the police academy and that a restaurant had an Axel Foley sandwich on the menu! (It’s been renamed the Timbaland) Axel Foley knows his way around LA better than his new partner on the case who was born there.
That new partner is Goodwin, a fat rookie with low self-esteem who has a crush on a lady cop in the facial recognition department. When he’s not solving the mystery of who tossed Billy out the window, Axel is playing matchmaker with these two. He’s also teaching Goodwin how to be a better cop. It’s like the Axel Foley Finishing School.
Along with Goodwin, Axel teams up with a limo driver named Elliot, who is the wise cracking comic relief. You wouldn’t think you would need comic relief in an Eddie Murphy movie, but Axel Foley has no funny lines. I don’t know if Brandt and Haas wrote the character unfunny to give Eddie room to ad lib or if they just think having him drop f-bombs every third line is the height of laughs, but Axel Foley is pretty much a Terminator in this movie. He just keeps moving forward no matter what like a shark in the water trying to find out who killed Billy.
It turns out that Billy was learning about a group of corrupt LAPD officers who were involved with gun running with a Beverly Hills rich kid who has ties to the military. The mystery isn’t that big a deal, and Axel mostly gets from place to place by half-assedly conning people. He makes up a fake story about who he is and then doesn’t follow through on it. It’s like Brandt and Haas saw the first BHC and just didn’t have the energy to write anything that matched up to it.
The really weird thing is that Axel Foley just isn’t a character in this movie. In the opening he’s followed a suspect into Canada and is illegally extraditing him, and from there he never takes a breather to be anything but a supercop. It’s almost like the writers took an Arnold Schwarzenneger script they had lying around and changed the details to make it a Beverly Hills Cop movie. There’s no fun in it.
The basic story of Beverly Hills Cop 2009 isn’t terrible. It’s a pretty standard police corruption story that has a personal edge for Axel Foley, and Brandt and Haas make it feel like an 80s action film by keeping the action more grounded, even though the final fight does include RPGs. But there’s no fun in the movie and it feels like it needs another draft to make the film an Axel Foley adventure and not a generic cop getting revenge picture.
Credit: Latino Review
