Beverly Hills Cop [Martin Brest, 1984]:
While it's disguised as an action-comedy (and a very good one), it wouldn't be unreasonable to say Beverly Hills Cop is more accurately a culture clash study on class relations, where blue-collar cop Axel Foley navigates the false fantasia of Beverly Hills and comes out on top. Every setting and scenario invites the audience to jeer and sneer at a community that hides corruption and inequality behind an elite surface. It doesn’t go so far as to become satire, but it's not merely escapism.
Here, the film could be seen as a companion piece of sorts to that other Jerry Bruckheimer production of the early 1980s, American Gigolo (1980), in the sense that Axel Foley, like the protagonist Julian Kay from the Paul Schrader film, is a working-class character navigating a world that he inherently doesn't belong to. He's there to provide a service, playacting roles and scenarios in order to plausibly navigate certain situations. The fake surface of the city becomes a carnival mirror, further alienating the protagonist by confronting him with its perpetual elitism, class bigotry and big money criminality.
Beverly Hills Cop [Martin Brest, 1984]:
That many of the film’s interactions are with people in the service industry isn’t accidental. Reception staff, waiters, valets, maître d's, cops, exotic dancers, gallery assistants. These are the invisible people that make the fantasia of Beverly Hills possible. They exist there only in the sense that they provide a service. They work to belong.
We can delight at Murphy’s incredible performance - which is absolutely tailored to his unique, comic skillset - but the film offers more than just the surface delivery of its admittedly engaging elevator pitch. From the opening montage of Detroit’s areas of economic decline, contrasted with the later montage of Beverly Hills opulence, to breaking up the party at elite social clubs and a literal raid on a mansion, the film is pushing its (playful) attack on systems of inequality for the benefit of its largely working-class audience.
