Beverly Hills Cop became the most successful film showcase for By Eddie Murphy talents, but it wasn’t designed for him. It was conceived as a straight Sylvester Stallone vehicle, and remained that way until a few weeks before filming began, when Stallone dropped out and Murphy stepped in at the last minute.
The concept ended up working better with Murphy than it might have worked with Stallone, because as an Eddie Murphy movie, Beverly Hills Cop‘s text and metatext fit together perfectly. Instead of Stallone in yet another macho cop movie, BHC became Eddie Murphy in a Sylvester Stallone movie; he’s as much of a fish out of water as Detroit cop Axel Foley is in Beverly Hills.
But the sheer brilliance of this construction also became the inherent problem with every Police officer sequel to varying degrees. You can never recreate that friction a second time. Eventually, every outsider becomes an insider. The fish out of water either acclimates or dies (at least comedically, in the case of the disastrous Beverly Hills Cop III). The core of the magic at the heart of the original film has proven unreproducible.
And yet there It is There’s something delightful about seeing Murphy as Axel Foley once again pestering and annoying the snobbier yuppies of 90210. And the advantage of taking so long to make a room Police officer – It’s been 30 years since Beverly Hills Cop III bombed in theaters — it’s Murphy he does It looks like he’s back on the shaky ground again, if not in Beverly Hills then at least in an R-rated action movie after years of churning out family-friendly comedies. Three decades later, the heat is kind of on again.
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And wouldn’t you know it, the same Glenn Frey song kicks off the opening credits of the new A Beverly Hills Cop. Murphy is certainly older — he turned 63 in April — but he still looks great, and more importantly, he seems happy to be back as Axel, the fast-talking Detroit detective with an unlikely talent for solving cases while causing massive amounts of collateral damage. And indeed, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F begins with Foley engaging in a massive chase through the streets of Detroit in a snowplow. The amount of chaos would have slowed down any normal cop — but not Axel.
Instead, he ends up returning to Southern California for the fourth time (or fifth, if you include who lost Beverly Hills Cop TV Pilot), after being contacted by his old friend Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) about a case involving Axel’s estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), who works as a defense attorney. Axel finds his other old Beverly Hills cop friend John Taggart (John Ashton) behind a desk supervising a new team of officers that includes the suave Captain Grant (Kevin Bacon) and the practical detective Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who has a past with Jane and clashes with Axel after he begins snooping on Abbott’s investigation.
A surprising amount of Axel FThe 115-minute runtime involves Axel and Jane trying to work through their personal issues while working together as de facto partners to try to clear the name of one of their clients. This subplot is also surprisingly underwhelming. Axel and Jane supposedly haven’t spoken in years, but the script by Will Beall, Tom Gormican, and Kevin Etten keeps tiptoeing around the reasons for their estrangement (or even the identity of Jane’s mother, or why Axel was such a bad father).
Worse still, there’s no comic tension in his scenes. Axel Foley never stops cracking jokes, assuming different personas, adopting wacky voices—except with his daughter, who is understandably annoyed by her father’s appearance but plays all their interactions tediously straight. It’s hard to frame this serious woman as Axel Foley’s daughter; every time this subplot comes up, it drags the entire film down. I’m genuinely confused why anyone thought this was the best angle for a bedroom. A Beverly Hills Cop.
Fortunately, the rest of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F — the parts that actually to feel as a Beverly Hills Cop movie — work. The chases and shootouts are solid, especially the one with the snowplow, which is funny and exciting and really sets the tone for the film right off the bat. It’s great to see Reinhold and Ashton back together as Rosewood and Taggart, and Paul Reiser is even better as Axel’s perennial Detroit PD buddy Jeffrey Friedman. Murphy also plays Gordon-Levitt well in his scenes. (Bronson Pinchot’s cameo as Beverly Hills’ obligatory foreign weirdo Serge is miserably brief.)
The mysterious plot of the script is nonsense, but the mysterious plot in each Beverly Hills Cop the movie is basically nonsense. That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here for Eddie as Axel, and in that realm, the movie more than delivers. Murphy is really on his game; much more than I expected after 30 years. This isn’t Eddie Murphy in a Detroit Lions jacket sleepwalking his way through a big Netflix paycheck; it’s Axel Foley improvising his way through one crisis after another. This
And that’s fun. You see, it can be more fun; a better detective story and a more believable connection between Axel and Jane would have elevated Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F above the other sequels — because, again, this franchise was never really built for sequels in the first place. (Even Beverly Hills Cop II (It’s an average film, helped along a lot by Murphy’s stellar performance and Tony Scott’s ultra-stylish direction.) Still, a solidly good film. Beverly Hills Cop movie in 2024 is such a pleasant surprise that it’s worth celebrating, possibly with a Neutron Dance.
RATING: 6/10
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