The ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ Legacy Is More Problematic Than You Remember
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F hits streaming with, if not outright high anticipation, definitely a modicum of good will. The latest entry in the long dormant franchise sees superstar Eddie Murphy returning as slick talking Detroit cop Axel Foley, and it’s understandable that fans would be eager to see Murphy don the old Detroit Lions jacket and get the ol’ Beverly Hills band back together for a victory lap on Netflix. But 2024 also marks 30 years since the classic original Beverly Hills Cop—a movie that Murphy himself recently dubbed the first Black blockbuster. That legacy is indisputably important, even if that legacy is as complicated as contemporary Hollywood’s handling of race in the years since it hit theaters.
Murphy isn’t wrong about Beverly Hills Cop as a boundary-shattering moment in Black cinema. Starring a 23-year old Murphy as the motormouth Foley, it was a fish-out-of-water action comedy about a Detroit detective suddenly in Beverly Hills to solve a childhood friend’s murder. Murthy’s star had been steadily rising since he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live as an untested 19-year-old in 1980.
Studios were suddenly eager to work with Eddie, but it’s easy to see, in certain patterns that became common in many of his ’80s hits, that studios were also still very skittish about a Black leading man in big mainstream movies. In that early string of hit movies that made Eddie Murphy a star, he was often the cool Black guy sharing the screen with mostly white co-stars; it was a dynamic that indicated studios were consciously trying to avoid these films being seen as “Black movies” in spite of their charismatic Black leading man. In Beverly Hills Cop, he had no love interest—merely a conspicuously flirtatious “friendship” with Lisa Eilbacher’s character, Jenny Simmons. It wasn’t an anomaly; Eddie didn’t have a love interest in Trading Places or 48 Hrs., save for a brief rendezvous with a party girl played by future Miami Vice star Olivia Brown near the end of Hrs.