IT’S been 40 years since Beverly Hills Cop broke box office records and made Eddie Murphy a megastar.
The Martin Brest-directed film spawned two sequels and its soundtrack topped the charts, while its theme tune is still easily hummable for anyone who packed into a cinema in 1984 to join Detective Axel Foley on his first adventure.
Now, Murphy is back in the role for the first time in 30 years for a fourth outing streaming exclusively on Netflix, which reunites Foley with his old pals Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) to uncover a conspiracy.
This time, when the life of his estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige) is threatened, Foley teams up with a new partner, detective Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to come to her aid.
Murphy was in his early 20s and fresh from Saturday Night Live when he made the first Beverly Hills Cop. Now 63, with other 1980s favourites like Trading Places and Coming To America under his belt alongside later hits like Bowfinger, The Nutty Professor and Shrek, the actor didn’t have any trouble slipping back into character despite all the time that had passed since Axel Foley last visited LA in 1994′s unforgivably lame Beverly Hills Cop 3.
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“I don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, I’m reliving it and I have to get back into it for the feeling,’” he says.
“I’ve played the character several times already, so I know him. Axel’s not a kid any more, it’s not his first time in Beverly Hills. At this point he’s been there many times, has friends there and has seen the crazy stuff that’s in the city. He’s not taken by surprise.
“Even though it’s a sequel, I’m not that 22-year-old any more. I’ve had this whole other life, and so I can act that.
“Axel at 22 and Axel at 63? He’s a whole different person with the changes that he’s made in life and his relationship with his daughter Jane. That is the emotional hook that you need for these movies.
“For Axel to get involved, he’s got skin in the game. All that stuff is on paper first and then I go to the set and do it.
“Anyone that saw the original Beverly Hills Cop, you’re going to love this movie. And even if you haven’t seen it, this movie stands by itself and you can jump right into it.”
For Reinhold (67) who was cast in the original Beverly Hills Cop straight out of his scene-stealing turn in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, it was “very sweet” to reunite with a cast he has known for such a long time.
“When the three of us (Reinhold, Murphy and Ashton) were together in the car, it was kind of surreal because the night we shot that we were just two blocks away from the original location we had shot in 1984.
“The crew got quiet and it was kind of spooky and wonderful for them, because they were kids - it’s like we had walked out of a storybook or something.”
Ashton (76), who wisely avoided participating in the second Cop sequel, nods. “It was very nostalgic in that car together for the three of us,” he says.
“It was weird, it was just like we’d never left. We got in the car and we were there. If somebody says ‘40 years ago’, I would go ‘No way, that was yesterday.’
“It just didn’t feel that way, we just were right back into it. For some reason, and I don’t know how, we all just melted right back into it.”
And the actors enjoyed seeing how much their characters have evolved over the intervening years since we last saw them.
“I liked the fact that Billy is not so naive and is experienced now and still an affable guy, but a very accomplished badass detective. I like that, " Reinhold says.
“And Taggart’s got a little more authority now,” Ashton adds, “So there is a lot more responsibility that he has now, when trying to juggle everybody with his authority and his responsibility.
“So it was a little more powerful position, but we still maintained our friendships.”
For Gordon-Levitt, best known for his roles in Inception and Looper, he was just a young child when the first film was released. Thus, it was surreal to step in the world of wise-cracking cops he had grown up watching.
“I certainly didn’t watch it in the theatre when it first came out, but I remember watching them when I was really young on TV with my brothers,” he says.
“My older brother turned me on to it because he was a huge Eddie Murphy fan, and the stuff that your older brother or sister likes, it takes on this elevated ultra-coolness, and that was Eddie Murphy for me.
“So now to get to be the sidekick in the new Beverly Hills Cop movie – I can’t believe it.”
Also new to the cast for the fourth film is Kevin Bacon, who was himself rocketing to fame in Footloose when the first Beverly Hills Cop film was released.
Now he joins the line-up as antagonist Cade Grant, a police captain in the Beverly Hills Police Department, and says the film takes audiences back to the 1980s heyday of action comedies.
“I saw them all at the time and when I got the gig, I went back and re-watched them all and just re-experienced the fun of those movies, where there’s a great tone that’s hit between action and comedy.
“That is really hard to hit, and it’s hard to make work these days. Those films are few and far between these days, and they were much more popular in the 80s.
“But then you look at Eddie, he is just such a great star, and so funny and so infinitely watchable and charming - so of course it has lasted for four movies.”
