Jerry Bruckheimer has just bought the rights to a short story Derek Haas wrote called “Shake” and hired the writer to expand it into a feature screenplay. The deal was for more than seven figures.
The origin of Haas’ story was a new site called Popcornfiction.com that he recently created for TV and film writers to showcase their pulpy short fiction. Among the contributors are Craig Mazin (“Superhero Movie”), Scott Frank (“The Lookout”), Jeff Lowell (“Over Her Dead Body”) and Nichelle D. Tramble (“Women’s Murder Club”).
“I wanted to create a place where new popular short fiction could flourish and Hollywood could have a new resource for cultivating great ideas,” Haas says on the site.
Bruckheimer apparently visited the site, loved Haas’ story of an FBI agent chasing a killer while he begins to lose control of his own body and bought the idea for a potential Disney film.
Here is the synopsis for Mulcahey’s latest film, The Courier. Sounds pretty cool, but a bit Transporterish.
A million bucks, just to a deliver a briefcase…
It’s a job too good to be true, especially if you’re the COURIER, a daredevil carrier renowned for taking on impossible missions who’s never, ever missed a drop. The only catch is delivering it to someone who can’t be found, not even by the FBI, and when that someone is the notorious, never seen King of the Underworld EVIL SIVLE who’s very name makes the toughest tremble, there’s a lot more than reputation and money on the line.
With a baying pack of double crossing feds, conniving crooked cops and ruthless rival crime bosses in hot pursuit, the Courier trail blazes a world-wide chase for the most wanted man in the land. Drugged, beaten, tortured and two timed, the bloodhound bagman discovers easy money was never so hard, and tracking the elusive kingpin to Las Vegas learns just why Evil is the one person on the planet no one can find, and why he really is the King…
UPDATE: The writers are Michael Brandt and Derek Haas who wrote Wanted (Filmstalker review) and 3:10 to Yuma. Home / Forum / Guestbook
Latino Review have got the script for the next Beverley Hills Cop movie (4 or IV or 2009) and, as expected it doesn’t sound too good. Written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, to be directed by Brett Ratner. Eddie Murphy apparantly doesn’t like it too much. Here is the review. Let me know what you think? Should this be made into the next Beverley Hills Cop movie or should they actually write something decent? Judge Reinhold must be gutted that his chance for a big comeback has gone splat!
It’s been 15 years since Axel Foley was last in Beverly Hills, and screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas needed a good reason to bring him back. That reason comes just a couple of pages into the latest script for Beverly Hills Cop IV (which calls itself Beverly Hills Cop 2009) – Judge Reinhold’s Billy Rosewood takes a leap out the 20th story of the Los Angeles Police HQ. When Axel hears that his former partner and best buddy became sidewalk salad he knows it wasn’t a suicide and he flies to Beverly Hills to get all the facts for himself.
I thought that Beverly Hills Cop 2009 would be a Bad Boys II style movie with all endless car chases and explosions. Brandt and Haas keep it all old school for the most part though, with a small shoot out and chase in the opening and then no more action for like 50 pages until Axel gets into a small fistfight with some East LA gangbangers. Unfortunately, a lot of the shit in the middle is way boring. The whole problem with another Beverly Hills Cop movie is that the basic idea that Axel Foley is this rough and tumble Detroit cop who is a fish out water in upscale Beverly Hills is played out. He’s done a lot of time in Beverly Hills. In this movie they mention that they teach his cases at the police academy and that a restaurant had an Axel Foley sandwich on the menu! (It’s been renamed the Timbaland) Axel Foley knows his way around LA better than his new partner on the case who was born there.
That new partner is Goodwin, a fat rookie with low self-esteem who has a crush on a lady cop in the facial recognition department. When he’s not solving the mystery of who tossed Billy out the window, Axel is playing matchmaker with these two. He’s also teaching Goodwin how to be a better cop. It’s like the Axel Foley Finishing School.
Along with Goodwin, Axel teams up with a limo driver named Elliot, who is the wise cracking comic relief. You wouldn’t think you would need comic relief in an Eddie Murphy movie, but Axel Foley has no funny lines. I don’t know if Brandt and Haas wrote the character unfunny to give Eddie room to ad lib or if they just think having him drop f-bombs every third line is the height of laughs, but Axel Foley is pretty much a Terminator in this movie. He just keeps moving forward no matter what like a shark in the water trying to find out who killed Billy.
It turns out that Billy was learning about a group of corrupt LAPD officers who were involved with gun running with a Beverly Hills rich kid who has ties to the military. The mystery isn’t that big a deal, and Axel mostly gets from place to place by half-assedly conning people. He makes up a fake story about who he is and then doesn’t follow through on it. It’s like Brandt and Haas saw the first BHC and just didn’t have the energy to write anything that matched up to it.
The really weird thing is that Axel Foley just isn’t a character in this movie. In the opening he’s followed a suspect into Canada and is illegally extraditing him, and from there he never takes a breather to be anything but a supercop. It’s almost like the writers took an Arnold Schwarzenneger script they had lying around and changed the details to make it a Beverly Hills Cop movie. There’s no fun in it.
The basic story of Beverly Hills Cop 2009 isn’t terrible. It’s a pretty standard police corruption story that has a personal edge for Axel Foley, and Brandt and Haas make it feel like an 80s action film by keeping the action more grounded, even though the final fight does include RPGs. But there’s no fun in the movie and it feels like it needs another draft to make the film an Axel Foley adventure and not a generic cop getting revenge picture.
Below is a mashup of the Axel Foley them with the Beastie Boys
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