'Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F' is more than mere fan service
Axel Foley returns, 30 years later, with a successful sequel that adds heart to the familiar formula
The original Beverly Hills Cop came out in 1984, 40 years ago, and the most recent film in the franchise arrived in 1994, 30 years ago. Not that Eddie Murphy hasn’t spent much of that intervening time trying to get the band back together for a fourth film.
At one point, those efforts were diverted into a TV series, which was to star Brandon T. Jackson as Axel Foley’s son, although that never got past the pilot stage.
Every itineration of Beverly Hills Cop follows the exact same formula: Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is a Detroit cop who makes a mistake that causes huge damage and embarrassment as the movie opens. Then, he ends up in Beverly Hills, where he spends most of the movie doing unconventional but effective police work despite having no jurisdiction. Murphy’s charm, throughout, overcomes and overpowers any and all plot contrivances.
That’s the case, once again, with Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the new film in the franchise featuring Eddie Murphy returning to the role for the first time in decades.
As the new film begins, Axel remains a Detroit police detective, introduced trying to foil a robbery at a hockey game and getting involved in an elaborate, destructive chase scene involving a snowplow.
This movie’s pretext to get Axel to the West Coast is some trouble involving his estranged and previously unmentioned daughter (Teyonah Paris), a lawyer threatened by gang members; that TV pilot in which Axel has a son, not a daughter, appears to have been retconned out of existence.
This brings Axel into a plot involving police corruption, one that features various familiar faces from the previous films (Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Bronson Pinchot, and Paul Reiser among them), as well as some new characters (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Kevin Bacon.)
The plot is neither memorable nor surprising, but it does deliver some laughs as well as heart, especially in the father-daughter plot. Yes, it works as a nostalgia exercise, which is how I expect many people to receive. But it’s a bit more than that.
Unlike the last time Murphy made a streaming-based legacy sequel to one of his ‘80s classics, 2021’s Coming 2 America, this one isn’t pure callbacks and fan service. Yes, it’s the same formula, much of the living original cast, and yes, the same music (the movie is even named after “Axel F,” Harold Faltermeyer’s iconic theme music.) But Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F also adds some heart and some concessions that things have changed quite a bit with policing in the decades since we first met Axel.
But more than that, it’s clear that Murphy still has it. He’s not going through the motions, and seems to be committed to the performance. Of course, it also helps that the 63-year-old actor has aged pretty well and doesn’t look ridiculous, still performing action sequences.
The film has much in common with the two Bad Boys sequels of recent years. Both are cop-related action comedy sequels to movies decades earlier, featuring the vintage Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Productions logo. Both are headlined by movie stars whose most successful days were presumed to be in the past until recently. Even the plot, involving police corruption and a plot to frame an older cop as dirty, is similar to that of the recent Bad Boys movies.
Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who directed the last two Bad Boys films, were even slated to direct Axel F at one point.
There’s one thing, though, that they don’t have in common: Bad Boys Ride or Die got a theatrical release, where audiences responded to it strongly. It would have been great if Axel F had gotten the same chance.
Each film in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise has had a different director. The original was directed by Martin Brest, the second by Tony Scott, and the third by John Landis; that not-much-loved third movie resulted from Murphy going back on one of the great burns of all time: “Vic Morrow has a better chance of working with Landis than I do.”
The director, TV commercial veteran Mark Molloy, proves adept at photographing action-adventure scenes. Also slated to direct a fourth Beverly Hills Cop at one point? Brett Ratner, who I am confident would have delivered a much worse film than the one we ended up with.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F debuts on Netflix on Wednesday.