Earlier in the year Eddie Murphy had made it known that he was interested in resurrecting the Beverly Hills Cop film franchise and bring back Axel Foley, one of his most successful characters, back into the limelight. A lot of people have been apprehensive about the idea because, frankly, Beverly Hills Cop 3 didn’t meet expectations and Eddie Murphy’s comedic career died right around the time he released the 2nd Nutty Professor movie. Well, we can all breathe a sigh of relief because according to Murphy the project has been scrapped.
Source: Movie Web
“They’re not doing it. What I’m trying to do now is produce a TV show starring Axel Foley’s son, and Axel is the chief of police now in Detroit. I’d do the pilot, show up here and there. None of the movie scripts were right; it was trying to force the premise. If you have to force something, you shouldn’t be doing it. It was always a rehash of the old thing. It was always wrong.”
I for one am very glad, but maybe not for the obvious reasons. I like that Murphy was the one who rejected the idea of “forcing” out another movie if the script wasn’t good enough.
As of the last 10 or so years Murphy had made a concentrated effort to forego the “Raw” style of comedy that started his career in the first place and instead concentrated on family movies with his reasoning being that he didn’t want to make movies that his children couldn’t watch. I always thought the idea was commendable until I saw a commercial one day for Pluto Nash. It had been downhill ever since. Earlier this year Murphy stated that he wanted to return to comedy in the style that made him famous but he didn’t receive much attention because, well, who the hell would believe the guy? Seriously, the movies he had been making were indeed family friendly but even the critics that reviewed them didn’t enjoy them. His only memorably appreciated roles, between ‘Daddy Day Care’ and ‘Meet Dave’, were as James Early in Dreamgirls and Donkey in the Shrek franchise. Again, this “family friendly” idea was commendable but the movies created as a result were just awful.
Murphy’s youngest child is about 9 now, and I believe a couple of his older children are known to show up on gossip sites from time to time. I really want to believe that he’s done with the ‘family film’ image and wants to return to the style of comedy that propelled his career in the late 80’s and early 90’s. After taking a few looks at the movie trailers and TV spots for “Tower Heist” it seems that he may actually be taking steps to bring this into fruition and I wholly support him and his endeavors in being funny again. When asked about his family film career he offered this:
“I don’t have any interest in that right now. There’s really no blueprint, but I’m trying to do some edgy stuff. And I only want to do what I really want to do, otherwise I’m content to sit here and play my guitar all day. I always tell people now that I’m a semi-retired gentleman of leisure, and occasionally I’ll go do some work to break the boredom up.”
Amen to that.
