Retro movie time. This entire series had somehow escaped me, so much that I don't think I've ever seen a clip of the movie. I remember as a kid I had a MIDI file called "Axel Foley" that was the theme song and liked it, but never saw the movie. So, I finished it over several sittings, and have to say I truly enjoyed this movie. The basic premise of the movie is a detective is partially victim to a crime in which an old friend is murdered so he goes out west to solve the crime with some assistance from another police department. There's so much good in this movie:
- Eddie Murphy is *clearly* having a shitload of fun, he's cracking so many jokes, just acting goofy, and you can see why he was so famous at the time. He just was funny as hell.
- The biggest thing that struck me in this movie, especially for it being in the early 80s, is that even though Eddie Murphy was black, it was never brought up in the movie. Like other officers respected him based on his reputation as a good detective, and for his quality police work. They never treated him like shit based on skin color. Maybe in movies at the time they chose to "be color blind"? Refreshing.
- Another quality I appreciated is that even though in the end he has to "save the girl", it was his friend, not a love interest. (I haven't seen the sequels, if that changes down the road.)
- I liked that the officers that were assigned to monitor him helped out when they were able to definitively see that Foley was right and had found bad. Especially the scene in the police department when the lieutenant is taking Foley seriously and trying to help, and they tied that together at the end when the lieutenant helped kill the bad guy with Foley.
- The lead henchman, is this this weird troll looking guy. Took me an hour to realize it was Johnathon Banks (Mike from Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul.)
I really don't think there was anything about this movie that I didn't like.
