The buddy, cop, action, comedy movie made popular in the eighties and nineties is back. It’s been a bumper year for these sequels too with Beverly Hills 4: Axel F. and Bad Boys 4 extending their positions in their respective franchises. Screenwriter Will Beall cut his teeth in the cop genre with a novel based on his own experiences as a Los Angeles police officer. His interest in law enforcement and justice resonates in many of his previous works including Aquaman, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Training Day, and Gangster Squad. Beall spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about how the Beverly Hills Cop and Bad Boys franchises have endured on our screens beyond their nostalgic entertainment value.
Will Beall
The undeniable cultural influences of Michael Bay who produced Bad Boys in 1995 and Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer who produced Beverly Hills Cop in 1984 remain just as relevant today as when they were released.
Will Beall indicates that these formative movies resonated with him in his early teens and shaped his tastes since first watching them. Westerns had fallen out of favor during that time and there weren’t too many action movies made.
An Extension Of Westerns
“There weren’t any buddy comedies that existed outside of the western genre,” suggests Beall. He argues that westerns are structured like a buddy comedy in terms of their “setup and execution.”
“Westerns would be a suitable template for a modern action movie. And Beverly Hills Cop is for sure a western. There aren’t any actual horse rides into town to avenge a friend. Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) confronts the cattle baron immediately. Zack Palmisano is the evil gunslinger and Axel saves the town in the original.”
Beall cites Lethal Weapon and Shane Black’s inspired writing as the “gold standard of writing these films.”
“That action comedy genre is so elastic. You can pivot from pretty broad comedy to intense action and drama because a lot of action comedies deal with police work. The job goes from one extreme to another in within minutes.”
Beall is fortunate to have three predecessors in each franchise to track their evolution and potential futures before he was charged with writing the fourth installation of each. The screenwriter isn’t too philosophical about a template for their success. He was always a fan of Bad Boys and Beverly Hills Cop before he become involved with the projects.
I remember going to see them in the theaters with my granddad and the audience just falling out laughing
“When you’re writing a legacy sequel, your first responsibility is to be a good steward; to do no harm. These iconic characters are like National Parks or Mount Rushmore. You have to respect them the fans. You must realize you’re standing on the shoulders of the writers and filmmakers who built them,” muses Beall.
Despite all the car chases and gravity-defying stunts, the original Beverly Hills Cop sets the thematic stage for future films. Mikey Tandino (James Russo), his old hoodlum buddy, and Axel are reminiscing in a bar and Mikey asks him, ‘Why did you take the fall for me?’ when Axel was found in a stolen car. Axel responds, ‘You don’t know, man? It’s because I love you.’” This exchange cements their relationship “and it informs everything that happens after that.”
Sadly, Tandino is killed later on. “It grounds the movie in a way, so that even as broad as the comedy gets later, it still is about avenging his buddy, this hoodlum that nobody else is going to care about it,” continues Beall.
“Let’s face it, no one in Beverly Hills was going to burn any midnight oil trying to find out who killed this two time loser who drifted into town.”
There was a pivotal moment in Bad Boys 3 when Captain Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano) and Mike Lowery (Will Smith) which inspired Beall’s approach to Bad Boys 4. Howard tells Lowery the Zen story about the guy on the horse at his granddaughter’s basketball game. “He asks, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Ask the horse.’ And Conrad turns to him and asks Mike, ‘Where are you going?’ It’s a high bar because that’s a real, truthful, and beautiful scene.”
Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) & Mike Lowery (Will Smith) in Bad Boys: Ride Or Die. Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures
These lines of dialogue changed the Bad Boys meaning for Beall about having a direction and purpose in life. “There’s a similar moment in Bad Boys 4 where I try to evolve the characters from there.”
Beverly Hills Cop has a notable history. It was going to be more of a straight action movie starring Sylvester Stallone. Martin Scorsese was initially going to direct it, but he backed away because he felt it was too similar to Coogan’s Bluff (1968) starring Clint Eastwood. As soon as Eddie Murphy got involved, everything changed. “Eddie is more a creator of that character than anybody else.”
Challenges Of Sequels
Writing sequels is always a challenge. Writers need to balance honoring the legacy films with moving the story forward. It cannot be a rehash of previous movies nor too much of a departure. Will Beall quotes the 2018 Halloween film directed by David Gordon Green as the perfect example of a sequel addressing these considerations.
“There are certain compulsories, like in figure skating. The audience demands certain things of a Beverly Hills Cop movie and you have to have them. You have to fulfill those expectations and then find ways to subvert them. Some of that comes from putting Axel in situations that you’ve never found him in before. And there are two new characters introduced.” Detective Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) plays the love interest and Captain Grant (Kevin Bacon) plays the corrupt cop.
Officer Renee Minnick (Bria Murphy) and Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/ Netflix
Axel also has a strained relationship with his daughter Jane (Taylour Paige). Axel needs to address his absent father issues and Jane needs to understand that parents make mistakes. “That’s a giant emotional center of this story in the way that Tandino was in the first movie. That exercises Axel in a new way.”
Axel has undoubtedly matured in a way that he couldn’t have done in the original movie.
Will Beall also perceives Foley as a time traveller. He references the 1973 Robert Altman film The Long Goodbye starring Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe. “Marlowe wakes up as though from a hangover. He’s still in his tuxedo and finds himself in modern day Los Angeles. It’s a subtle thing. There’s a little bit of that in the opening of Beverly Hills 4.”
“Axel drives out of the tunnel in the opening of the movie and he’s still in his old car. He’s an analog cop in a digital world.”
Components Of Action Comedies
These are muscular movies propelled by visionaries such as Joel Silver, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Shane Black.
These are unbelievable, bombastic, funny, exuberant action comedies
“Some of those are informed by the character of Rambo. There’s a scale of action that you don’t typically find in a movie like that. It’s a kind of mythic hero in a modern setting that I don’t think you’d seen since some classic westerns.”
Beall references Jeff Bridges in John Carpenter’s Starman where he describes “human beings as being at their very best when things are at their worst.“I think that the action movies of the eighties and nineties are about flawed people who were forced to hang together.”
Buddy comedies are more than friendship movies. They are often about a “found family in the way that John Wayne and Walter Brandon and Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson become a family in the course of Rio Bravo. It’s the pressure cooker of the situation that makes them bond.” Rambo, on the other hand, is a lone wolf.
Many action comedy films also explore racial tensions and stereotypes with various degrees of intensity. Beall allows the characters to inhabit their roles, but the screenwriter doesn’t lean into them too much. “I want to make movies for the broadest possible audience. I want to make movies that everybody can go see and enjoy, no matter who you are, where you’re from or what you’re like. You fit on some spectrum or another.”
Movies of that era relied more on practical stunts and action sequences than they do today giving them a unique visual style. The action spans the intense, to the ridiculous, to the preposterous.
Will Beall believes action sequences require their own three-act structure. “It’s almost its own movie. An action scene only works if the character story is still happening and still informs those scenes.”
In reference to Bad Boys 4, “These guys are coming together to rescue Armando (Jacob Scipio). You see Armando’s vulnerability Lowery being there for him as a father. Marcus (Martin Lawrence) does something almost superhuman to try to save this kid. And it’s all out of love for Lowery.”
After a near two-hour adrenaline jolt, audiences appreciate quieter ending to these films. The characters chat and ponder the next stages of their lives.
“The closing scenes of Beverly Hills Cop of Axl F. are emotional scenes, for the most part. You have the cool tag with the three guys in the car where things are getting realer than they’ve been. It doesn’t have anything to do with the case or good guys and bad guys. And you know that they’re going to be okay afterwards.“
