Beverly Hills Cop
Damn, Eddie Murphy is like a charismatic Dave Chapelle. The film is a weird blend of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, on the comedic side. It’s all script, with minor Bruckheimer action scenes peppered within.
The film starts with our hero failing to bust some crooks for selling cigarettes without paying the proper taxes, leading to a truck chase. Then come the establishing shots of Detroit, not helicopter footage, but its equivalent: b-roll of assembly lines in some automaker, dating this immediately to another era.
Axel Foley is a cowboy cop, a hustler in the good sense. He can just about rizz his way out of any situation, he’s just that good. What he can’t stop is avoid his buddy straight out of jail to be executed by pros just outside his apartment, over some Deutschemark bearer bonds (another period piece, pre-perestroika currencies).
He overheard enough to follow the trail of the killers to LA, Beverly Hills in particular. It’s a good thing too, his boss was about to fire him for insubordination. In LA he plays the race card to get the presidential suite (full on N-word screams in the lobby!).
He meets another old friend, an art gallery manager, which helps him out for old times sake. She helped the other dead guy, and can’t really believe her boss had him whacked. He also gets acquainted with the local PD, by-the-book cops which are his exact foils in every way. Including RoboCop’s boss, Cohaagen himself, in a rare sympathetic role!
It’s smooth sailing from here on out, even thought in the final shootout, Axel kills more guys that Rambo. They are mostly laughing all the way, and the cops with a stick up their asses learn to live a little by going to titty bars, laundering civil rights violations by using vacationing cops, and gross embezzlement by paying for luxuries with public money. Fun for all family!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.