Getting the opportunity to direct a “Beverly Hills Cop” movie is quite a big responsibility. At least it was for director Mark Molloy, who made his feature debut with the highly-anticipated Eddie Murphy film. Appropriately, Molloy carried with him a lot of reverence for the original movie, which is made clear in the one scene he wanted to do: a nighttime stakeout by Axel Foley, Billy Rosewood, and John Taggart which ends up closing the film.
As Molloy told Entertainment Weekly about the scene, “I always had that image of those three guys on a stakeout in the car together, it was just imprinted in my brain … And then I remember sitting with the three of them in that car, and I actually happened to look around at the crew filming it. I just saw on everyone’s faces, like, ‘Oh man, this is exactly where we want to be right now.'” The scene was also an opportunity for Murphy, Reinhold, and Ashton to improvise, as they had done on the first film.
Despite Molloy claiming to have never seen “Beverly Hills Cop III” (a blessing in disguise), he was adamant that he wanted the film to pay tribute to the franchise by bringing back as much of the returning cast as possible. Thankfully, it’s all resulted in a film that feels lovingly indebted to the trilogy that came before it.
