Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
Discussions of a sequel to Beverly Hills Cop began before its release in theaters. Nevertheless, Paramount execs took a wait-and-see approach but didn’t have to wait long, as it shattered box office records for the highest-grossing comedy, Christmas release, and R-rated film of all time to that point. Only four prior films made more money during their first month of release (E.T., Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Ghostbusters). Paramount wanted to strike while the iron was hot by launching a “Beverly Hills Cop” TV series co-starring John Ashton and Judge Reinhold reprising their roles as Taggart and Rosewood. However, after growing stymied to find someone who could fill Eddie Murphy’s shoes as Axel Foley, and determining that the TV series could halt the momentum of the film series, they nixed the TV avenue.
As for what to do for the next film, Simpson and Bruckheimer felt that sequels need not be set in Beverly Hills, as Axel would no longer be a fish out of water there. Instead, it could be an episodic series, each film representing a new case taking place in a different location featuring Axel Foley, much like Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films or 007 in the James Bond series, any place where a brash, loud-mouthed cop like Axel would make big waves. Their primary story idea was to have Axel on vacation in London, but his curious nature leads him to get involved with solving a crime that has the prim and proper police at Scotland Yard stymied. Murphy voiced that he wanted to work again with Ronny Cox, John Ashton, and Judge Reinhold. They came up with a notion to have Captain Bogomil head to Europe to attend an international conference for police chiefs when something bad happened to him and Axel, Rosewood, and Taggart show up to save their friend.
In May of 1985, Sports Illustrated journalist Dan Jenkins and his writing partner Bud Shrake wrote up the London-based script. While Paramount loved their completed draft, a fatal obstacle occurred when Murphy paid London a visit. Upon stepping out of the airport, Murphy was hit by the trademark bracing cold and proclaimed, “I hate this!” They sent Murphy to Paris as a backup idea, but after Murphy stopped there, he exclaimed, “I hate this even more!” Thinking that Murphy wanted sunny weather and lush environs, the studio offered Hawaii, but Murphy nixed this outright – he was tired of traveling and wanted something closer to home. At this point, the logical solution was to find a way to set it in Beverly Hills yet again. This time out, rather than a fish out of water, humor would come from Foley as a young guy coming to terms with an adult world.
Shrake and Jenkins drafted a new script, entitled, “Beverly Hills Security Guard”, in which Foley goes undercover as a Beverly Hills warehouse rent-a-cop, helping Taggart and Rosewood solve a series of burglaries of priceless art. The culprit is a security service run by someone named Lawrence who was formerly known as a major criminal in Detroit known as ‘Tony Lulu’. Axel has a romance with a young female security guard named Lucy Wilson. Culture-clash jokes abounded, such as showing that inmates in the Beverly Hills jail watch “Dynasty” on the prison TVs and the winos look like Crockett from “Miami Vice” in Armani suits.
Alas, Murphy didn’t care for it. The comedy was too broad and obvious, the action seemed mostly absent, and the story regurgitated the same beats as the first film. Murphy felt there was no rush, as he wanted to do different movies before playing Axel Foley again. Lined up next was The Golden Child, followed by either a dramedy about a black vaudeville actor who finds himself in charge of a young child called Butterscotch (later called The Butterscotch Kid) or an idea co-written by Murphy called The Key. He also wanted to do a stand-up comedy and music concert to promote his music album, “How Could It Be”, which would be filmed and later released as a theatrical movie after Cop II. However, after The Golden Child proved disappointing critically and commercially, Murphy felt pressure to deliver a surefire hit to avoid losing his box-office luster. Butterscotch was too much of a gamble, so he repackaged it as a starring vehicle for comedian friend Arsenio Hall that he would direct. Meanwhile, Paramount gave Murphy extra incentive to escalate Cop II as his next film by re-negotiating his five-picture contract. Cop II would pay him a $8 million salary and a percentage of the gross, plus $4 million to his production company.
A revised draft of the Shrake/Jenkins script finds Axel again posing as a security guard to stop the theft of Defense Department weaponry being shipped out in Fredericks of Hollywood boxes. Action beats included a shootout at the airport in Detroit as well as taking down a theft ring from out-of-work actors in Beverly Hills at a market called Quiche and Carry. While Shrake and Jenkins’ draft scripts were well-regarded by the producers, Murphy’s manager, Bob Wachs, pushed to scrap the script, which he claimed Murphy would never go for and he’d be too embarrassed to show him, effectively leading to the removal of the screenwriters.
In February of 1986, Murphy and Wachs came up with their own ideas for what they wanted to see in the second film. They envisioned Foley dressing in an Armani suit and driving a red Testarossa Ferrari for an undercover sting operation that takes him to Beverly Hills. One of the scenes should involve Axel going to the Beverly Hills Gun Club. They dubbed their nemesis the Alphabet Bandit, an anonymous criminal leaving cryptic messages at the scene of the crime, as Foley once again teams up with his friends in the Beverly Hills PD to crack the case. They talked about their ideas to Simpson and Bruckheimer, who told them to take it to Paramount executive David Kilpatrick to begin handing off to a new screenwriter to flesh out.
Martin Brest turned down several lucrative offers to return as the director stating that he didn’t want to repeat himself artistically. Simpson and Bruckheimer pursued Tony Scott, who had just finished directing Top Gun for them to huge success. Scott was initially hesitant. He wanted to work with Murphy but he didn’t want to do a sequel. He was won over when the producers promised him he could do it his way rather than try to recreate what Brest had done. Murphy, however, was tepid toward Scott’s comedy credentials. However, Murphy warmed to him more after they shot several games of pool and he played a good game. Scott was struck by how shy Murphy was in person, in contrast to his loudmouth persona on stage and in comedy. Murphy jokingly told him he’d approve of him taking job so long as he made him look as good as Tom Cruise looked during the volleyball game in Top Gun.
Paramount wanted the production to begin in October 1986 to ensure release on Memorial Day weekend 1987. Scott felt this was too soon and threatened to drop out. Paramount and the producers spent the next ten days making concessions keep him Scott locked in, including postponing the shoot to November, allowing hm more action sequences, granting him carte blanche to choose his own production crew, in addition to nearly $1 million in salary plus a generous profit percentage.
Needing a screenwriter quickly, they borrowed Highlander scribe Larry Ferguson’s services from another Paramount producer. Ferguson’s skillful reputation and love of anything to do with cops made him a perfect choice to expand the Murphy/Wachs ideas. Ferguson determined that one of the Bandit’s victims is Detective Bogomil, so Foley flies out to Beverly Hills to find the culprit when Lutz, the new Beverly Hills police captain, seems too inept to solve the case. Ferguson holed himself up in Santa Barbara working round the clock. After submitting his draft, Paramount returned it with a list of suggested changes for the revision he’d spend the next two weeks completing.
After that, Scott demanded another revision, this time with much more action. Scott’s philosophy is if they hit harder with the action, they would laugh harder for the humor. Between the high-octane action and the big laughs, Scott wanted audiences to leave the theater exhausted from the experience. Unfortunately, Murphy wasn’t happy with the Ferguson script, which wasn’t as funny or snappy as he’d envisioned. By this point, Ferguson was too burnt out for another pass, so Simpson and Bruckheimer asked veteran teleplay writer Dennis Klein to perform a polish to punch up the comedy and get Axel from Detroit to Beverly Hills much sooner than Ferguson. They also pulled in script doctor Warren Skaaren, who worked on the final ten drafts of Top Gun, to work in tandem with Klein on other parts of the script. Skaaren’s main charge was to give more warmth to Axel and suspense to the detective work.
Skaaren spent ten days on the polish, then continued by providing additional phone consultations to fix dialogue issues that arose. He added a phone conversation between Axel and Bogomil to discuss their upcoming fishing trip, suggesting they remained good friends since the last film. He also introduced Bogomil’s daughter, Jan, to further emphasize that Axel was a close family friend. He removed an introductory scene of Axel taking down a credit card scam at a Detroit restaurant. This scene was revived during post-production reshoots because Simpson and Bruckheimer revealed that Scott leaned too heavily on action and this scene established much-needed humor in the first few minutes. Skaaren wanted Jan to be directly involved in the third-act theatrics, but Simpson wanted the focus to stay on Axel. Additional jokes were inserted during other lengthy stretches of action. To deliver cheesecake appeal, Scott wanted Axel and company to visit the Playboy Mansion, the first Hollywood film to do so, including adding a volleyball scene not dissimilar to a similar one Scott added to Top Gun.
Reinhold only agreed to return on condition he wouldn’t play Billy Rosewood as naive as in the first film. He should be more confident and assured after two more years of experience. Scott was the one who decided Rosewood should have a major fetish for firearms and ultraviolent Stallone films like Rambo and Cobra, which, coincidentally was a movie idea that came about from Stallone rewriting the original Beverly Hills Cop script to a more action-oriented vehicle that Paramount didn’t want to make.
After Marcello Mastroianni turned the film down, Dennis Hopper was offered a lucrative role as the main baddie, Maxwell Dent, but decided to take only a third of that offer to direct the LA street gang film Colors instead. The role was finally cast with Jurgen Prochnow three weeks into filming.
The role of Karla Fry was originally a male character but changed in October 1986 to female for the purpose of attaching Sylvester Stallone’s wife, Brigette Nielsen because Scott thought it would make for a more interesting movie. Scott had a vision of her coming across like a white Grace Jones. It is widely thought that Murphy, a good friend of Stallone, encouraged Scott to get her in the film as a favor.
Gil Hill was brought back as Gilbert Todd, Axel’s police chief in Detroit, as well as Paul Reiser as a fellow officer. However, only exterior scenes in Detroit were shot there. Murphy was not involved in those, and they postponed those scenes until later for the weather to grow worse to provide more contrast with the ever-sunny skies of Beverly Hills. Bronson Pinchot was asked to return for a bit role as Serge but passed because he was doing the TV show, “Perfect Strangers”. Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer asked Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner to audition for a major role that never manifested.
At the time of the beginning of filming on November 5, 1986, the script wasn’t yet finalized and not all of the locations were detailed. Rumors abounded that Murphy would sometimes not show up on the set. Scott denies Murphy was a no-show but did admit Murphy did show up late on many occasions. Scott enjoyed working with Murphy, who he felt had great instincts that might be lost if he overprepared. Murphy would constantly change scenes but Scott was tolerant because he often made the scenes better. While Scott storyboarded daily how he was going to shoot each day’s scenes, Murphy improvised most of his dialogue. It was a regular occurrence for Murphy to look at the script for the upcoming scene, proclaim it was awful, and then come back later having come up with a better idea. He felt as long as they gave him the beat of what was to occur for the scene he could take it where it needed to go.
The script supervisor had a difficult time because Murphy never said a line from the script verbatim and never delivered dialogue the same way twice. Murphy hated a scene as scripted where he gets interrogated by Chief Lutz. After leaving for a few minutes, he came back with an improvised Jamaican psychic character called Johnny Wishbone. Murphy also improvised scenes of Axel conniving his way into the gun club and the Playboy mansion as someone is sent to clean up poop in the pool.
Murphy also made public outings difficult, showing up everywhere, including his luxurious trailer, with an entourage of up to 50 people. Much of the time, no one, even his manager, could speak to Murphy except through one of his family or friends around him. Murphy’s reclusiveness and insulation drew comparisons to Elvis; Murphy says he was more like Garbo, except he wanted to be left alone rather than be alone. Murphy claims he’d been too mistreated by others, especially the press, so he preferred keeping the company of positive people around him.
Well into the shoot, Stallone and Murphy’s friendship disintegrated after a Stallone heard a rumor that Murphy had an affair with Nielsen. Murphy called Stallone, who was angry, to vehemently refute the rumor but Stallone couldn’t stop believing it and the friendship was over. In Nielsen’s 2011 autobiography, she also denies having an affair with Murphy. Stallone and Nielsen’s marriage further found itself on the rocks after Stallone took away her credit card after she spent her allotted $350,000 annual allowance lavishly partying with the film’s cast and crew, She also did have an affair with notoriously promiscuous director Tony Scott (Scott called the affair “horrendous”), who was all but completely separated from his commercials’ producer wife Glynis in London he’d married the year before. Further rumors abounded that Nielsen was in an affair with her female personal assistant, Kelly Sahnger and that Jackie Stallone, Sly’s mother was the one who found the ladies in bed together. Stallone vehemently denied these rumors publicly but divorced Nielsen quickly afterward. Perhaps not coincidentally, Tony Scott also divorced his wife, Glynis, though apparently not get together with Nielsen. Nielsen later stated in her memoirs that she regretted not finding a way to make it work with Scott rather than connect with her next beau, New York Jets defensive end Mark Gastineau.
On the last day of the scheduled shoot, they hadn’t completed shooting all of their intended scenes. Scott said that the shoot went over schedule because the time it took to do the elaborate action sequences was underestimated.They asked Murphy for a few more days but he said he would only do it for a million dollars a day, even though Paramount paid a million to cover Murphy’s legal expenses prior to the shoot just to get him on the set when he was sued by his former manager, King Broder, for skimping on his share from previous work. The remaining scenes had to be shot using Murphy’s body double. Reportedly, Murphy wanted to be given the red Ferrari from the movie in exchange for doing publicity shoots. When Simpson and Bruckheimer refused, Murphy staged a ‘sit-in’ protest until Paramount caved and got him an identical car. The producers deny this happened and that Murphy bought his own.
In total, eleven screenwriters contributed 22 revisions before the end of production, including David Giler and Sylvester Stallone. Murphy and Wachs applied for and received a story credit for concocting the Alphabet Bandit scenario, providing lucrative royalties for video sales and TV showings. The writers’ guild ruled that Skaaren and Ferguson would share screenplay credit, sparking litigation from Ferguson, who demanded sole credit for the screenplay and story, stating Murphy didn’t contribute anything, Wachs’ involvement was only 4 points out of the 33 in the plot, and Skaaren only tweaked a third of the script. Shrake and Jenkins also joined Ferguson’s suit, but after several years of arbitration, the initial WGA credits stood.
The soundtrack features George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” as its first single which gained a Razzie Award for Worst Original Song. Detroit’s own Bob Seger provided the title song, “Shakedown”, which received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. Nielsen, who was launching her singing career at the time, coordinated with Madonna’s producers, Giorgio Moroder and Jellybean Benitez, for songs for the soundtrack but none made the cut. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were asked to produce four tracks for the album but they declined.
Scott was in a rush to complete the editing in time for the release date because he had only six weeks rather than six months, especially since he needed to perform a number of pickup shots in the reshoots. Despite it coming together in haste, Beverly Hills Cop II had lots of momentum from the first film and did very well at the box office, particularly in its first month of release, where it secured the top spot in US receipts. It grossed over $150 million in the US and over $300 million worldwide, making it the top earner for 1987. Although he heavily promoted it at the time of release, Eddie Murphy would later call Beverly Hills Cop II the most successful mediocre picture in history, neither as spontaneous nor funny as the first.
Ranking pretty high among disappointing follow-ups to films I love, Beverly Hills Cop II takes what worked in the phenomenally entertaining first film and overdoes it. The action is way over the top, the comedy is far more obnoxious, and the characters and their interactions have become crude, cartoonish, and clichéd. The subtlety of Martin Brest’s light touch is lost in favor of the slick, stylized mechanics of Tony Scott, coming off Top Gun to grind through seemingly endless action scenes at the cost of story cohesion.
Scott hasn’t much comedic ear and his begrudging attitude to allow for gags in this film shows, sticking to his wheelhouse of all-out action. It feels like the explosive film Stallone wanted to do that Paramount nixed before hiring Murphy.
Characterizations feel off. Whereas Axel Foley used to be a regular guy with a street-savvy Detroit edge he’s become very GQ for this film, sporting a fancier car and more stylish clothing, while also knowing “MacGuyver”-ish tricks to do with everyday objects to bypass high-tech security systems with a stick of chewing gum and the like. Murphy works best when hungry and humble — when he’s a vain big-shot, the comedy fizzles.
His humor relies on vulgarities, channeling sexual references or potty humor to squeeze out laughs. Foley cons his way into the Playboy Mansion as a pool cleaner, claiming someone pooped in the pool, in a scene contrived to get more scantily-clad babes in. This schtick of adopting funny accents and characters was funnier in Fletch, which is a better successor to the style and spirit of the first Beverly Hills Cop than this.
The other returning characters are also different. Bogomil is now a caring family man, Taggart a sexist, and Rosewood, a gun fetishist who’d make Dirty Harry blush. The first film had an easily discernible plot that was a springboard to comedy. The sequel is mired by having sketchy characters continuously describing the convoluted and uninteresting plot, leaving little rooting interest in the action sequences.
Beverly Hills Cop II contains few memorable laughs, not many more thrills, and very few situations that prove interesting to watch. Even the soundtrack, which proved so vital for the first film’s success commercially and critically, proves less of an enhancement. It offers us little that we enjoyed in the first outing except to bring back the same actors — and even they aren’t playing the characters as those we’ve come to know.
Qwipster’s rating: D+
MPAA Rated: R for violence, nudity, sexual humor, and language
Running Time: 100 min.
Cast: Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Brigitte Nielsen, Jurgen Prochnow, Ronny Cox, Allen Garfield, Dean Stockwell, Paul Reiser, Gil Hill, Paul Guilfoyle
Director: Tony Scott
Screenplay: Larry Ferguson, Warren Skaaren