Beverly Hills Pig IV STORY DETIALS

by **J The Kidd** Mon Dec 01, 2008 12:59 pm

Released in 1984, the “Beverly Hills Cop” grossed $316 million
worldwide and spawned two sequels. All told, the three pics grossed
$712.9 million worldwide. The last was released in 1994.

It's been 15 years since Axel Foley was last in Beverly Hills,
and screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas needed a good reason to
bring him back. That reason comes just a couple of pages into the
latest script for Beverly Hills Cop IV (which calls itself Beverly
Hills Cop 2009) - Judge Reinhold's Billy Rosewood takes a leap out the
20th story of the Los Angeles Police HQ. When Axel hears that his
former partner and best buddy became sidewalk salad he knows it wasn't
a suicide and he flies to Beverly Hills to get all the facts for
himself.

I thought that Beverly Hills Cop 2009 would be a Bad Boys II style
movie with all endless car chases and explosions. Brandt and Haas keep
it all old school for the most part though, with a small shoot out and
chase in the opening and then no more action for like 50 pages until
Axel gets into a small fistfight with some East LA gangbangers.
Unfortunately, a lot of the shit in the middle is way boring. The whole
problem with another Beverly Hills Cop movie is that the basic idea
that Axel Foley is this rough and tumble Detroit cop who is a fish out
water in upscale Beverly Hills is played out. He's done a lot of time
in Beverly Hills. In this movie they mention that they teach his cases
at the police academy and that a restaurant had an Axel Foley sandwich
on the menu! (It's been renamed the Timbaland) Axel Foley knows his way
around LA better than his new partner on the case who was born there.

That new partner is Goodwin, a fat rookie with low self-esteem who has
a crush on a lady cop in the facial recognition department. When he's
not solving the mystery of who tossed Billy out the window, Axel is
playing matchmaker with these two. He's also teaching Goodwin how to be
a better cop. It's like the Axel Foley Finishing School.

Along with Goodwin, Axel teams up with a limo driver named Elliot, who
is the wise cracking comic relief. You wouldn't think you would need
comic relief in an Eddie Murphy movie, but Axel Foley has no funny
lines. I don't know if Brandt and Haas wrote the character unfunny to
give Eddie room to ad lib or if they just think having him drop f-bombs
every third line is the height of laughs, but Axel Foley is pretty much
a Terminator in this movie. He just keeps moving forward no matter what
like a shark in the water trying to find out who killed Billy.

It turns out that Billy was learning about a group of corrupt LAPD
officers who were involved with gun running with a Beverly Hills rich
kid who has ties to the military. The mystery isn't that big a deal,
and Axel mostly gets from place to place by half-assedly conning
people. He makes up a fake story about who he is and then doesn't
follow through on it. It's like Brandt and Haas saw the first BHC and
just didn't have the energy to write anything that matched up to it.

The really weird thing is that Axel Foley just isn't a character in
this movie. In the opening he's followed a suspect into Canada and is
illegally extraditing him, and from there he never takes a breather to
be anything but a supercop. It's almost like the writers took an Arnold
Schwarzenneger script they had lying around and changed the details to
make it a Beverly Hills Cop movie. There's no fun in it.

The basic story of Beverly Hills Cop 2009 isn't terrible. It's a pretty
standard police corruption story that has a personal edge for Axel
Foley, and Brandt and Haas make it feel like an 80s action film by
keeping the action more grounded, even though the final fight does
include RPGs. But there's no fun in the movie and it feels like it
needs another draft to make the film an Axel Foley adventure and not a
generic cop getting revenge picture.