Eddie Murphy

  • Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)

    Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, August 2007) More action, more comedy, more snazzy visuals! This second helping of Axel Foley has the added bonus of Tony Scott at the helm, some fair action sequences and a number of intriguing visuals (though Scott would more than top himself later on), but the self-awareness of the cast and crew often gets annoying: Eddie Murphy’s fast-talking riffs can deaden the film fast, and the improvised dialogue between the actors has a loose quality that’s perceptibly less interesting than scripted dialogue would be. Though the plot still doesn’t make much sense twenty years later, the rest of the film is good enough to be seen again.

  • Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

    Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 1998) Unexplainably, I think that film is weaker than its sequel… but that’s just me. Still, Eddie Murphy is in top form as an unflappable Detroit policeman investigating a murder in sunny California. Watching this movie now is probably even funnier that it was then, given that the sunny-California-cop formula exhibited here has been copied countless times from the serious (Lethal Weapon) to the silly (The Last Action Hero). We get all the clichés. But I still prefer the sequel.

    (Second viewing, On DVD, August 2007) Holding up better than most contemporary releases, this first Eddie Murphy release still has some charm and interest. Though it can’t shake off the legacy of almost twenty five years of increasingly sophisticated Action/Comedy hybrids, this unexpected hit still works reasonably well. Eddie Murphy’s grandstanding can be grating, but the repartee with the other characters can be a hoot. Plus, hey, at least two pieces on the soundtrack have become classic pop music. The DVD edition contains a reasonably informative director’s commentary track, as well as a number of documentaries that rely a bit too much on archived footage.

  • Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)

    Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) A mess. Purely and simply. Sometime comedy, sometime action, the mixture just clashes—for instance at the end, where all three main characters have been seriously shot and the film plays is as a laugh-aloud funny moment. The more-than-obvious dialogue given to Eddie Murphy doesn’t help either. The worst thing about this unholy mixture of bad directing and awful writing comes after the last scene, when the credit sequence informs us that no one else but John Landis (Gremlins, The Blues Brothers) and Stephen DeSouza (Die Hard) have produced this piece of garbage. Sure, there are one or two good action sequences (the first car chase, and the ride rescue) but the remainder is bad enough to make you grind your teeth.