Beverly Hills Cop Review
Following up on the successes of 1982's 48_Hrs. and 1983's Trading_Places, Eddie_Murphy returned to the screen a year later with Beverly Hills Cop, a rollicking action-comedy that firmly established him as one of the premier stars of the day. Mixing laughs, violence and strip clubs -- a recipe if ever there was one for a guy-movie -- Beverly Hills Cop succeeded to the tune of 316 million worldwide. Though future films would prove him all too fallible, Murphy is unstoppable here as the wise-cracking, fish-out-of-water Detroit cop Axel Foley. Other players add a lot here too, notably Judge_Reinhold's dopey tagalong and Bronson_Pinchot's cameo as an art gallery host. And talk about hindsight being 20/20: Axel was almost played by Mickey_Rourke, then Sylvester_Stallone -- both of them only after Clint_Eastwood turned down an earlier, more serious conception of the role. It's worth paying attention to Beverly Hills Cop's admirable and strong-selling soundtrack as well -- if "The Heat Is On," "The Neutron Dance" and "Axel F.," the film's synthesizer-heavy theme song, don't bring you back to the mid-eighties, nothing will. The plot is not exactly ground-breaking cinema, and sometimes its violence is a little excessive and conventional. Nevertheless, Beverly Hills Cop is a highly entertaining film that proves there was a darn good reason why Eddie_Murphy was once king of the box office. Matthew Doberman, Rovi
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