At the recent press day for Stardust, I asked erstwhile
Warner Bros. executive turned Transformers
and Shooter
producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura — who’s currently prepping Nowhereland with Eddie Murphy — about the status of the long-rumored Beverly Hills Cop IV,
which has been parsed and examined by studio bean-counters trying to figure out
if an R-rated franchise installment would make any sense given Murphy’s current
family-crowd drawing power.

 always think of the movie
as an Axel Foley movie and less as Beverly
Hills Cop.”

“You know, (Jerry) Bruckheimer did such a good job with that
series, and to try to replicate what they did would be a mistake,” continues di
Bonaventura. “We have the advantage of enough time having passed that Axel is a
different guy. What that guy is another question, but that’s going to be the
interesting challenge — how do you take what you loved about him and move it 20
years older? Because he’s a very cocky cat, that’s cool when you’re
twentysomething, but how is it when you’re fortysomething, how do you make that
acceptable when you’re fortysomething? For me, I want to see a little build, I want
to see something happen to Axel where you go, ‘Come on Axel, get cocky again!’
You have to make the audience wish him to be that cocky guy.”

He’s right, of course, di Bonaventura — but the problem, in addition to so-so grosses of the last installment, from 1994 (it grossed $42 million Stateside, but $76 million internationally), is that Murphy remains an aloof and kind of surly public figure. The young, brash, beaming Murphy of Saturday Night Live is gone, replaced with stories of churlish behavior, the obligatory out-of-wedlock love child (with Scary Spice, was it?), and, most damningly, a string of uninspired, mush-mouthed, lowest-common-denominator movies.

All of this is thought to have cost Murphy the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the heavily hyped Dreamgirls. When people see an actor milking a role generally considered long past its prime, as with Sylvester Stallone and last year’s Rocky Balboa, they want some small degree of prostration — a nod of atonement for interim missteps, real or perceived. Why does it not seem likely that Murphy will either grasp or offer that?