Beverly Hills Cop 3 left all manner of questions unanswered – ranging from “A big wheel? Huh?” to “Deary piss, why hasn’t this film ended yet?”

So praise be that Eddie Murphy has finally decided to go and make the long-anticipated but massively unwanted Beverly Hills Cop 4. We haven’t been this excited by anything Eddie Murphy’s done since every single lunatic decision about his personal life that he’s made in the last decade.

However, it’s been 14 years since the last Beverly Hills Cop movie was released, so Beverly Hills Cop 4 will need to reflect where Eddie Murphy’s career has taken him in the meantime. In short, all the characters in Beverly Hills Cop 4 will be played by Eddie Murphy and they’ll all wear female fat suits and the whole thing will be set inside Eddie Murphy’s head and there’ll be a talking raccoon in there somewhere as well. Oh, and it’ll be crap.

Now here’s a surprise – after Die Hard 4 and the last Rocky movie and the last Rambo movie and the new Indiana Jones movie all did rather well at the box office, every single washed-up actor on the face of the planet has hatched a plan to wheel out a semi-retired character of theirs for a career-revitalising sequel.

But while we’ll have to wait a little longer to see Tom Cruise in Cocktail 2: Yup, He’s Still A Dick and Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard 2: Maybe In Retrospect I Should Have Let That Annoying Whore Die, Eddie Murphy wants in right away, and he’s bringing Axel Foley with him.

Yes, 14 years after the last installment and 24 years after the original was released, Eddie Murphy and Paramount have decided to put Beverly Hills Cop 4 into production. But don’t worry if you have fears that Beverly Hills Cop 4 is going to shit all over your happy childhood memories of the original, because Paramount isn’t stupid. It’d never let a hack like, say, Brett Ratner take the reigns of such a cherished franchise. MSNBC reports:

Paramount Pictures has given the go-ahead for a fourth installment of its “Beverly Hills Cop” franchise, with Eddie Murphy on board to return to the role that launched his movie career, the studio said on Thursday. Brett Ratner, the filmmaker behind the similarly themed ”Rush Hour” movies starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan, is in negotiations to direct the latest “Beverly Hills Cop” adventure, a Paramount spokesman said.

Oh. Balls. Still, at least this way there’s a chance that Eddie Murphy will have an insensitively stereotypical ethnic sidekick. That’s something, we suppose.

Anyway, it’s a brave move for Eddie Murphy to want to make a Beverly Hills Cop 4, because we were under the impression that he already rode the wheels of that particular franchise long ago.

When adjusted for inflation, the original Beverly Hills Cop stands as the 38th biggest movie in history, while Beverly Hills Cop 2 is the 151st biggest movie ever. And then there’s Beverly Hills Cop 3, which at the moment is somewhere around the 1,200th biggest mark. If this pattern continues, then Beverly Hills Cop 4 will be watched by a solitary pensioner who only wandered into the cinema to escape a thunderstorm and almost instantly decides to take his chances with the lightning and the skull-sized car-destroying hailstones instead.

Still, you can’t blame Eddie Murphy for wanting to hark back to a simpler, more successful time, before he decided to get caught up in various scandals involving transvestite prostitutes, pregnant Spice Girls and crazy two-week marriages that didn’t ever exist.

In that respect, Beverly Hills Cop 4 is a way for Eddie Murphy to reset the clock on the career. Which is great – because this means the next time he throws a shitty tantrum about not winning an Oscar, it’ll be like that magical first time all over again.