“Beverly Hills Cop” wasn’t supposed to be an Eddie Murphy film in the first place. It was initially developed as a straight-ahead action vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, but when the star’s vision for the movie deviated from the filmmakers’ take on the material, Murphy, who’d become an overnight sensation thanks to “48 Hrs.,” “Trading Places” and his brilliant run on “Saturday Night Live,” stepped into the reconfigured role of Axel Foley.
Right away, director Martin Brest realized that Murphy worked best when riffing off lived-in characters instead of one-dimensional straight men. Though the screenplay didn’t dive deep into the lives of the people drawn into Foley’s chaotic orbit, actors like John Ashton, Judge Reinhold, Lisa Eilbacher, Ronny Cox, and Paul Reiser gave the film a rich human texture that brought out a heretofore unseen warmth from Murphy. Gil Hill, the Detroit cop-turned-actor who tears into his role as Foley’s enraged superior, single-handedly raised the narrative’s stakes via his onscreen intensity alone. These were real people whose livelihoods were placed in jeopardy by Foley’s self-righteous antics.
And then there’s Bronson Pinchot, who did the unthinkable in 1984 by stealing an entire scene from Murphy as the espresso-obsessed art gallery employee Serge. We weren’t used to seeing people fluster the comedic superstar, but Pinchot has Murphy off-balance throughout their first encounter. Unlike the cop car chemistry between Murphy, Ashton, and Reinhold, it’s the kind of moment you can’t recreate.
So when Paramount moved forward with “Beverly Hills Cop II” three years later, they focused on the replicable elements of the formula and wound up with a satisfying encore.