Cultural Gap Film #4: Beverly Hills Cop

Relevant elements: Wisecracking loose cannon cop archetype, Eddie Murphy in his glory days

Why it resonated: Despite the role being originally intended for Sylvester Stallone (which helps explain my longtime question: Isn't Axel a strange name for an African American detective from Detroit?), this film took the already strong action/cop genre and fused it with the country's hottest comedian to help establish the formula that Jerry Bruckheimer and others would spend the next generation following to the point of exhaustion.

General comments on the film: Seeing it for the first time now, it's hard to determine exactly how much the movie is following the conventions of the genre and how much it is establishing those conventions, but in any case, it checks off nearly all of the familiar elements, right down to the plight of the poor fruit vendor during the opening car chase, during which the film seems to be trying to keep Detroit's automotive industry going by smashing gratuitously into as many huge cars as possible. For a while I thought there wasn't going to be the requisite strip club scene, but how dare I doubt Bruckheimer?

I found this movie's iteration of one of the standard genre roles--the exasperated boss of the cop who plays by his own rules--to be top-notch, so I looked up the actor and discovered that he was a real-life Detroit detective. That was a nice touch. Otherwise, this film is basically a time capsule of 1984's vision of Los Angeles: blonde women with huge sunglasses riding in convertibles along Rodeo Drive, etc. All of that is backed by the constant sound of 1984 behind all of the action: “The Heat Is On,” “Neutron Dance,” “New Attitude,” and the ever-present "Axel F."

Only two things interrupted my comfortable immersion in the genre and time. The first was the typeface choice for the movie's title sequence, which seemed way too old-fashioned-scrolling-Hill-Street-Blues-y for the sharp-edged modern California setting. Speaking of which, the Beverly Hills police department looked like a set borrowed from WarGames--filled with giant blinking computer consoles and high-tech screens--which seemed odd in such a low-crime precinct. Otherwise, watching this film for the first time felt like watching it for the twentieth time. Now I have to figure out how to stop humming that song.