The other day I was on the subway, in the midst of a longish journey, and serendipitously decided to listen to the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack on my iPod. Whence the serendipity? I'm glad you asked. As all reliable determinant metrics show, Beverly Hills Cop is the perfect pop movie. It has Eddie Murphy at the height of his powers, a great supporting cast, a script that balanced action and comedy better than any other, and (per the inspiration for this musing) one of the best soundtracks ever. It was enormously popular, and despite both sequels sucking polar bear dick its memory is un-fuck-with-able.
Still, with the apparent mission in Hollywood to remake every movie released in the 1980s, there remains a possibility, however slim, that Beverly Hills Cop might join the parade. This is something I would prefer not to happen. I mean, I'm not climbing the walls in existential dread and hissing jeremiads in Latin at passersby (that's Wednesday night) but it is a fear. In the interests of making the best of a bad situation, I propose that rather than try—and fail—to recapture the original's perfection as pop, that we go a different direction. As the good doctor said, “When the going gets tough, the tough get weird.” In that vein, here is Beverly Hills Cop as remade by five international directors of varying degrees of renown:
Catherine Breillat's Beverly Hills Cop (international title: Un baise cochon va a Californie), dir. Catherine Breillat
Rocco Siffredi stars as a Marseille gendarme who pursues the murderer of a criminal pal to Beverly Hills. He talks only with his dick, which is a metaphor for his gun, which is in turn reciprocally a metaphor for his dick. His pursuit of the villains, punctuated by frequent unsimulated sex, serves as a critique of the male gaze. All the Americans are played by French people doing American accents (a la Heavy Rain). Ends up having almost nothing to do with the original, but hey. Hire an auteur, get an auteur picture.
Beverly Hills Cop, dir. Lars von Trier
In a massive surprise, a shot-for-shot remake of the original with the same music, same script (with all Eddie's ad-libbing transcribed and created precisely down to the syllable), but with the one inexplicable choice of having Charlotte Gainsbourg play Axel Foley, with none of the gender pronouns changed. Lars will be Lars.
बेवर्ली हिल्स के एक पुलिस: हीट पर फिर से है. (trans. Beverly Hills Cop: The Heat Is On Again) dir. Farhan Akhtar
Having remade Don (and done a sequel of that remake), Shahrukh Khan goes “fuck this, if I can remake an Amitabh Bachchan movie, Eddie Murphy ain't a thing.” After deciding against (and thus deeply wounding) Karan Johar as director, Shahrukh hires Don: The Chase Begins Again helmer Farhan Akhtar to lend it that snazzy, pizazzy, slick Hollywood feel. Arjun Rampal is cast in the Steven Berkoff role because one of the little-known pieces of cinematic wisdom, in the West at any rate, is that any movie that climaxes with Shahrukh Khan and Arjun Rampal beating the shit out of each other is going to be good. In spite of the jokes about all Bollywood movies being three-plus hours long, this is not the longest remake of the five (more on that in a bit, and the Bollywood overlength jokes are dated anyway), though there are plenty of songs; in a massive coup, SRK lands Beyonce for an item song, which leads America as one to embrace Bollywood. SRK then promptly converts to Scientology and fucks everything up. But, in spite of that, we'll always have this movie, where he pulls off his usual “How the fuck is this guy going to own? Whoa . . . holy shit, he does kind of own. Damn, he actually really owns. Wonders never cease” three-act high-wire act.
Az élet egy amerikai rendőr (trans. The life of an American police officer) dir. Béla Tarr.
The longest of the bunch, consisting of one eight-hour single take of Axel Foley (played by Donald Glover, thus making Tarr, bizarrely, the only director who thought to make the picture with a 20-something black comedian) at his desk, doing paperwork and making phone calls, for a whole shift; when Axel gets up to take a piss or get a cup of coffee, Tarr's camera stays on his desk, speaking to the grim nature of day-to-day reality as a policeman. The business of the dead friend and the Beverly Hills police investigation of Victor Maitland is handled entirely over the phone, with Axel's side of the conversation the only one we get to observe. The film ends with Axel receiving one final call from BHPD from which one can either infer that they'll be investigating Maitland or that they're just humoring Axel. The credits roll in silence.
Laurel Canyon Cop, dir. Lisa Cholodenko
Still smarting from the eight or nine years it took her to get financing for her third feature, 2010's The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko accepts a massive goddamn pile of money from Paramount to direct a Beverly Hills Cop remake. After a careful series of negotiations that end with her getting final cut, Cholodenko raises the “fuck you” flag to full mast and casts Gina Gershon as Axel Foley, turning the original's gay subtext (a byproduct of the perfect storm of Eddie's “the lady doth protest too much”ism on The Gay and the fact that they had to cut the fuck scene between him and Jenny Summers because a black guy couldn't shtup a white lady in a move in 1984, one of the thousands of reasons you can blow 80s nostalgia out your fuckin ass) into text.
So, basically, what we're talking about here is a leisurely-paced (maybe a little too leisurely-paced, but hey, ya can't win 'em all) movie where Gina Gershon flies in from Detroit and swaggers around in a leather jacket owning bad guys and having sex with Jenny Summers (Carla Gugino). And, although everyone spends an hour laughing their asses off at how dumb it is, they keep in the line “I wish they all could be California girls,” uttered by Gina immediately before going to town on Carla Gugino. This picture ends up grossing a billion dollars, sweeping the Oscars, and ushering in an era of world peace.
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| The banana in the tailpipe scene is handled a little differently in this one. |
I don't believe in jinxes, so if you see in Variety that they've announced a Beverly Hills Cop remake, don't blame me. Just repost the shit out of this so I can walk around with my zipper down fulminating about how fuckin prescient I am. Which I do anyway, but it's always nice to have supporting texts. Now let's all do the Neutron Dance.
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