Beverly Hills Cop

OK, let's cut the bullshit and get to the point. Despite what everybody says, this isn't a good picture at all. Remember the gag that went that Doc Severinsen isn't a good trumpet player, he just sounds like one? Well, this is a picture that isn't a good picture, it just looks like one. And I mean this in the most literal sense. It's kind of funny--before I saw it, I'd ask people who had if they liked it, and they all sort of smiled and said "Yeah, it was good." The response was so unemphatic that I had to wonder if people knew why they liked it, or, for that matter, whether they really liked it at all, or if somehow they didn't feel shortchanged. Don't get me wrong: if you go see it, you will laugh (I did) and be moderately entertained.

But when I came out at the end, I felt like I had just sat down at a meal for two hours and was still hungry. The picture is all surface, flash and so-called sophisticated humor, but it's really all a lie. Sure Eddie Murphy is good-he's a talented, natural comedian. But I think he's stretching his "hip Black guy makes the white dudes look stupid" act a little thin. But what really irks me is that this picture pretends (and successfully I know-for a while it took in one of every three box office dollars) to be a really original, with-it comedy, in the tradition of great comedies of the past.

But the truth is that this movie owes far more to all those good and bad Black exploitation pictures than it owes to any good comedy of the past. The real truth is that it is a Black exploitation picture. But it's pulling the wooL over everybody's eyes, and that's why its success pisses me off. All the white suburban kids can go and laugh and feel good because they saw a really "quality" picture with a black man as the hero, but they're the ones who are getting faked out, because the picture is as exploitative as any blaxploitation picture of past years. (God only knows what Black people think of BHC--could they be offfended?) Don't get me wrong--I have nothing against exploitation (within limits, obviously); I love it when some guys get a great, exploitative idea and make a crappy movie about it and pull it and rake in the dough. At least that's honest. what I can't stand is an exploitation picture that wears the cloak of an open-minded, liberal, humanistic comedy. Too bad, because the opening was good--tough, gritty, good music. Eddie Murphy, watch out, or you'll become the world's hippest Uncle Tom.