While it’s been 30 years since Eddie Murphy last donned Axel Foley’s Detroit Lions jacket, that’s hardly remarkable by today’s standards. Heck, the gap between Beverly Hills Cop III and Netflix’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is shorter than Murphy’s other legacy sequel, 2021's Coming 2 America (that one courtesy of Amazon), a 33-years-too-late follow-up to its 1988 predecessor. No, time isn’t the primary factor when considering the pluses and minuses of Axel F; it’s the fact that, by ‘94, Eddie Murphy was all but checked out on Foley’s misadventures, turning in a yawner performance in an otherwise inert action comedy. It seemed the electric, rapid-fire charisma that had made Murphy a superstar in Beverly Hills Cop had all but dried up.
So, what’s changed? If Murphy couldn’t muster his character’s nervy energy in a film made when he was in his prime, what are the odds that a movie made a full three decades later will be a return to form, not just for the franchise but its star? Must there be another Beverly Hills Cop movie? Netflix seems to think so, as it’s positioned Axel F as its big July 4 holiday release. Murphy and fellow Cop producer Jerry Bruckheimer also clearly believe there’s plenty left in the tank for ol’ Axel, as there are already plans to produce a fifth entry in the series.
Fans of moldering franchises, particularly those seemingly undying series from the vaunted ‘80s, have already been down this road plenty of times. With Axel F, Murphy’s character joins a pantheon of aging screen icons who’ve dusted off their pop ephemera for one more go at glory, though it should be said that the film, directed by first-timer Mark Molloy, plays it safer than other paradigm-challenging outings like Indiana Jones And The Dial of Destiny or Top Gun: Maverick. Its screenplay (by Aquaman co-writer Will Beall, among others) doesn’t much care to explore the subject of Foley’s age, or even broach where a fictional cop who plays by his own rules might fit in a modern climate less inclined to valorize onscreen police officers. Even that title’s reference point, Harold Faltermeyer’s iconic theme song, only gets a slight tweak in its update. This is not a movie out to rock the boat, nor is it willing to relapse to the caustic harshness of earlier installments. Nice and easy, that’s how Axel F plays things, and so does Murphy.
It’s enough to know that by the time Axel F begins, Axel has since been married, divorced, and has an estranged daughter named Jane (Taylour Paige), who has legally changed her surname to Saunders and works as a Beverly Hills criminal defense attorney. That isn’t necessarily a slight against her father’s chosen profession, she says, but her choice of career does serve as one of the film’s few soft jabs at modern police commentary. There’s an early exchange between Murphy and a returning Paul Reiser that also faintly gestures at this. “They don’t want swashbucklers out there; they want social workers,” Riser declares. Axel’s response, jovial and dismissive: “I’m terribly social!”
If there was any hope (or fear, depending on your temperament) that the latest Beverly Hills Cop might attempt to Say Something about the fraught current state of police/community relations in metro areas across the country, know that Molloy’s movie has other concerns. Chief among its ambitions is to capture the cadence of the first two films and otherwise whip up a moderately good time. Molloy seeks a shaky balance between the maximalism of Tony Scott’s Beverly Hills Cop II and original director Martin Brest’s meandering easiness. For the most part, he achieves it; while the film putters about between its action sequences, when they hit, they’re appropriately chaotic and big (a car is suspended three stories outside a parking garage via tow truck), if occasionally sloppy (an early plow truck chase is more loud than impressive) and largely bloodless, despite its R rating (squibs splurt gently and digitally).
Despite this overall caution, the throwback vibes are vivid. In both structure and presentation, Axel F often feels as ‘80s as cocaine and Kevin Bacon—and, wouldn’t you know it, this movie contains scads of both. (Bacon plays Cade Grant, a posh police captain with a million-buck grin.) As Axel cruises through his native Detroit, with on-location shooting reminiscent of Brest’s film, Molloy serenades us with Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On” over his title cards, and good luck shaking off that nostalgic fix. Molloy and Murphy are playing the hits, quite literally and brazenly—even Bob Seger’s “Shakedown” gets some air time before the film’s first 10 minutes are out.
Naturally, most of the franchise’s recognizable names return: John Ashton (who came out of retirement for this reunion) finesses his role as Taggart so that it’s more than a glorified cameo, putting his years behind the gruffness of his character and new high position in the Beverly Hills police force; Judge Reinhold wanders into the frame early on, looking bewildered to be here, but he fits more snugly than Bronson Pinchot’s effusively flamboyant Serge, a broad anachronism who pops up briefly during one of the movie’s more dire stretches.
As to the plot, it’s boilerplate. Reinhold’s character, Billy Rosewood, is now operating as a private investigator who occasionally works with Jane, and their latest investigation involves an alleged cop killer and a narcotics conspiracy, which yanks Axel back into the weirdo expanses of Beverly Hills. Axel F might operate under the lazy credo “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but recycling the Beverly Hills Cop formula is at least an efficient method to get the movie going.
That economy is not afforded to the rest of the film, which stretches out to a bloated two hours in order to introduce the next generation of Cop players, positioned neatly to fill out future installments. There is, of course, Paige’s Jane, curt yet vulnerable. Her scenes with Murphy are adversarial, but sweet in their way; Jane has a more credible approach to selling bullshit to the many hapless individuals who cross her and her father’s path than her old man ever did. Perhaps Paige will have more chances at this kind of fun in the next outing; her cool, measured delivery is a welcome counterbalance to her slick, smooth-talking old man.
Other players are brought into the fold in diverting story cul-de-sacs as the movie sluggishly unravels its case. Luis Guzman plays a bedazzled drug runner, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as tough-cop Bobby Abbott, is here to make eyes at Jane and give Foley what for in terms of procedure and conduct; in one scene, he rifles through Axel’s Beverly Hills criminal file and drops one of the movie’s better yuks: “‘94, not your finest hour!”
Indeed, 1994's Beverly Hills Cop III was not Foley’s finest, nor was it Eddie Murphy’s, who sleepwalked through John Landis’ copper capper and whose listlessness secured the franchise’s once seemingly permanent retirement. And while III was, and remains, the franchise’s lowest point, let’s not kid ourselves by suggesting that Beverly Hills Cop has always been some kind of clinic on the action-comedy—none of these movies ever quite mastered that tricky balance, and neither does Axel F. What this film provides is easy charms; luckily, those come plenty.
Axel F is the most even-keeled of the Cop films—it lacks Tony Scott’s visual heft (as do all non-Scott movies), but there is are tangible emotional stakes, and Foley’s tamped-down temperament lets us better appreciate Murphy in this kinder, gentler phase in his career. “Most guys your age slow down, you know? Taking desk jobs, trying to relax a little bit,” one character tells Foley during a car chase. As he crashes through traffic, Foley retorts, with a beaming grin and twinkle in his eye: “This is how I relax!” His manic energy as a comic may have dimmed in the intervening decades, but there’s no refusing the genial appeal that remains to Eddie Murphy, Movie Star.