BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F is a perfectly entertaining, perfectly obvious long-awaited nostalgia sequel, perfect for streaming once and forgetting. Eddie Murphy (DOLEMITE IS MY NAME) returns to play Detroit police detective Axel Foley 40 years after the original and 30 years after the disappointment of BEVERLY HILLS COP III. He still has the same job, same basic outfit, the soundtrack repeats “The Heat Is On,” “Neutron Dance” and part II’s “Shakedown,” and the score by Lorne Balfe (TERMINATOR GENISYS, BAD BOYS FOR LIFE, TOP GUN: MAVERICK) reworks Harold Faltermeyer’s beloved “Axel F Theme” and mimics some of his 1984 synth sounds.
So this is not a “He’s having to face age and change!” sequel like ROCKY BALBOA or a “He’s passing the torch” one like CREED. Instead it’s a “He’s still here, not much has changed!” His boss in Detroit was killed in part III, but his old partner Jeffrey Friedman (Paul Reiser, WHIPLASH) is the chief now. Jeffrey tries to convince Axel to visit Beverly Hills not for a case, but to reconnect with his grown up, estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige, ZOLA). He moved her to Beverly Hills when she was young and then divorced her mother, they have not spoken in years but somehow she’s family to his 90210 cop friends Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold, GREMLINS) and Taggart (John Ashton, HIDDEN ASSASSIN). Billy was pushed off the force and became a private detective (but still loves Rambo), Taggart is the chief now.
Jane works as a defense lawyer and is terrorized by masked men for defending an alleged cop killer Billy told her was set up. Everyone keeps saying she’s exactly like her father, which is important to put in the character’s mouths since they sure as fuck didn’t put it into her characterization. You’d think if she was exactly like her father she would get to smile or make a joke more often.
Axel gets arrested, he calls his daughter, she hangs up on him twice and only helps very reluctantly when he tells her her dear beloved father figure Billy called him about the case. I suppose it’s kind of clever to have the uptight partner hate him not for being too unpredictable, but for being her deadbeat dad. They tenuously, unpleasantly team up to follow the trail of clues Billy left behind, starting to work through some of their issues along the way.
I say “left behind” because Axel can’t find or get ahold of Billy, and finds some scary thugs ransacking his office. He ends up missing for several days, but it never seems to occur to them that he might be dead, so I felt assured he’d turn up safe at the end. I have a very strong feeling they originally had him dying at the beginning but either did reshoots or weren’t very thorough about rewriting it when they realized that would be too much of a bummer. Research confirms that at least the 2008 draft by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas (2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, 3:10 TO YUMA, WANTED) was about Axel returning to Beverly Hills to investigate the murder of Billy.
I had some questions about the continuity of the Axel-verse. At the police station Detective Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, HALLOWEEN H20: TWENTY YEARS LATER) digs out Axel’s file and it’s all about the incidents in 1984, 1987 and 1994. But all the new cop characters know his name and all about him and they say Taggart always tells “Axel Foley stories.” Taggart wasn’t even in part III, he’s probly been around him, what, a week or two over 40 years? How many stories could he have?
(My wife says part II has photos indicating they’ve gone on fishing trips and stuff. I haven’t seen it in a while.)
The craziest part is when they call up Serge (Bronson Pinchot, RISKY BUSINESS) to help with something. I wanted Jane to ask “Who’s this guy again?” and for Axel to say “Oh, he’s this guy I met briefly at an art gallery 40 years ago and bought a gun from 30 years ago.” Instead Jane remembers him from childhood, so maybe he went on fishing trips too.
Here’s the other thing. Jane’s age tells us that Axel had a wife and daughter at home during part III. Never called them or mentioned them. Seemed to fall in love with Theresa Randle. But I get why they didn’t care about that here. Trying to find some character drama is more important than staying consistent with a sequel nobody liked. It makes sense that they only refer to part III to take a swipe at it, but I would respect them more if they gave Axel a faded Wonder World Axel Fox t-shirt.
Paige and especially Gordon-Levitt do a good job of being the new cast members interacting with the old ones. Gordon-Levitt actually kinda looks like Judge Reinhold, and I’m surprised they didn’t make him his son, but I respect this one very minor case of not going the most obvious route. Okay, the “young partner who doesn’t have the same values” is also very obvious, but they get some humor out of it. It actually is pretty modern that Bobby laughs off Axel’s attempts to insult his manhood and really doesn’t care.
There are a few very slight feints at trying to make a BEVERLY HILLS COP movie for the era where people have noticed that cops are not your friend. When Axel surrenders to the police he references Black men needing to take extra caution in order to not get shot by police. And Jeffrey makes some claim that things are different and cops can’t get away with as much anymore. I’m sure was meant as a modern detail, but they made the same claim in DIRTY HARRY, a movie that came out before I was born. I leave it to you to judge whether police reforms have been more significant in real life.
They also do a MAGNUM FORCE, because the bad guys are corrupt cops, which I would mark as a spoiler but I think you and I both knew it the moment Kevin Bacon (THEY/THEM) introduced himself to Axel. He’s a good villain though, a strong point of the movie, and I also think they did a good job of casting his burly cop goons. I recognized one of them (Mark Pellegrino) as one of Jackie Treehorn’s thugs in THE BIG LEBOWSKI. He’s beefed up since then.
One thing I noticed: Taggart is close to the bad guy, mentored him, excitedly introduces Axel to him, is offended and doesn’t believe it when Axel later tells him he’s dirty. Hector Elizondo did all the same stuff in part III as the character they turned Taggart into when Ashton turned it down.
AXEL F is constructed around investigating this mystery, and also finding a series of unusual vehicles to drive around recklessly in. We get a snowplow, a meter maid truck, a helicopter, a moving truck full of statues – anti-climactic, but maybe they’re saving the hovercraft, the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile and the truck towing the giant promotional Eddie Murphy head from MEET DAVE for part 5. By the way, the second unit director/stunt coordinator is Mike Gunther (SABOTAGE, TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS, STAR TREK BEYOND, TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT, BUMBLEBEE, director of BEATDOWN, the MMA movie starring Rudy Youngblood).
Within this procedural/chase structure it’s Murphy’s job to riff and be charming and occasionally let other people say some funny stuff. And at this important job the movie is fairly successful. I had a bunch of laughs. I was glad they found ways for him to do his Bugs Bunny shit without straight up repeating “is this the illegal chop shop?” like in part III. To be honest I’m very surprised they didn’t try to do some reference to the banana in the tail pipe.
In the tradition of Donnie Yen, Murphy seems to be playing Axel as somewhat ageless. He has an adult daughter but otherwise hasn’t grown up. He’s also well preserved and jokes about Jeffrey looking ten years older than him. His BHPD friends do look ancient though, and on one hand I know the main appeal of this movie existing was a sort of “getting the band together” legacy sequel deal. But on the other hand it sort of underlines the emptiness of the whole thing because it seems ridiculous and/or sad that these poor old men would still be doing this job. And since this is not a theatrical release anyway and doesn’t need to be broadly appealing wouldn’t it be cool if they took the risk of making a new movie that takes a few cues from the old one but does new shit and is interesting and has something to say about where they would be in life? And, you know, you’d still have your Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride scenes, and a Pointer Sisters song?
Well, no, of course they didn’t do that, this is a sequel that has been talked about and developed since the ‘90s, with many false starts. The perfectly-tuned-to-do-exactly-what-everyone-expects sequel was probly the best case scenario. It’s been in the works so long there were two separate times when Brett Ratner was attached to direct. Also the duo who did the last two BAD BOYSes, who left to do BATGIRL (R.I.P.). The guy who ended up doing it is a rookie feature director named Mark Malloy. He’s Australian and has done commercials for Johnnie Walker, Nissan and Apple. His Wikipedia pages says he worked with Matt Reeves, but it was on a series for Quibi. Whatever his vision as a director, he does have the skills to make it look more like a real movie than some of the streaming originals, and I’m happy to observe that all the stills I found online have the appearance of film grain.
The screenplay is credited to Will Beall (GANGSTER SQUAD, AQUAMAN, ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE, BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE) and Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten (THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT). Many came before them, with a break in the middle where they tried to instead do a TV show about Axel’s son, with Murphy only making special appearances, like Christopher Lambert in Highlander: The Series. In one version, Axel had moved to Beverly Hills and gotten used to it and would have to return to Detroit during the coldest winter on record. Can you believe that? They tried to do one that had a new spin. What were they thinking!?
Reportedly, a fifth film is in development. Since the average gap between these is about 13 years, Axel will be 76 years old, but look about the same as now. Maybe now that they got this one out of their system they can do something unexpected. The LAST JEDI of the BEVERLY HILLS COP series.
It’s fine. You should watch it if you’re interested. At least it’s better than any of us expected.
July 10th, 2024 at 10:45 am
I had about the same reaction to this. In the Dr. Strange multiverse, I can certainly imagine at least theoretically plausible (if improbable) pathways that led to a much better film than this, but I also can imagine many more, higher-probability paths that lead to a much worse film. For every TOP GUN: MAVERICK, you’re going to have plenty of later-period TERMINATOR sequels. So, I can’t be too mad at this one. Eddie is game, everyone else is pretty on point, there’s nothing grossly incompetent or eye-rolling, production values are solid if unremarkable. Yup, it’s fine. Does it raise or diminish my enthusiasm for PART 5? It diminishes it. Make of that what you will. The soundtrack repeats coming early and furious were the initial tip off that we were taking the “competent but unimaginative/play-it-safe, boilerplate fan service” lane. Could’ve been worse!