Review by C.J. Bunce
It’s nice when a movie delivers what it promises. Do yourself a favor and watch Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, back-to-back with the original 1984 Beverly Hills Cop. What you’ll probably get is the feels–as the movie is heavy on nostalgia, but not in the typical Hollywood throwaway manner. This one delivers in the same way as Top Gun: Maverick. It’s faithful to the original, which shot Eddie Murphy into superstar status, and it’s also the rarest of sequels in the long-standing cop movie franchises going back to Dirty Harry, Shaft, and Die Hard, because it actually is good. Don’t miss this fresh, big-budget blockbuster streaming direct to Netflix for this Fourth of July weekend.
If you take a step back to the Shaft reboots you may recall how Samuel L. Jackson played the son of Richard Roundtree’s original Shaft. It was the familiar passing of the torch, handing the story off to the son, one that worked well enough it was done again via a second reboot in 2019 (reviewed here). Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F mirrors this construct, only this time the hand-off is to a daughter, here to Eddie Murphy’s infamous Detroit cop. That’s Taylour Paige (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) as Jane Saunders (who took her mother’s name after the parental break-up). Jane isn’t a cop, but a Beverly Hills defense lawyer.
Every Beverly Hills Cop story must get Foley out of Detroit and back into Beverly Hills, of course. Just like Fast & Furious movies assemble the same unlikely characters for each new journey, this franchise operates with certain linchpins, too. Jane is life-long friends with the franchise’s Billy Rosewood, a character Judge Reinhold has no problem stopping back into. He’s quit the force because ex-partner and now chief John Taggart (played by an even craggier John Ashton) didn’t believe him when he named one of Taggart’s underlings as a bad cop. That underling is Kevin Bacon’s Captain Cade Grant, a villain the script doesn’t even try to hide, because viewers will enjoy watching Bacon do his best at being sleazy and vile, similar to the villain he played in the X-Men, minus the superpowers.
The twist on the “passing the torch” trope is that Jane isn’t a cop, yes, but this is better. Why? The screenplay takes extra efforts to make this less about laughs and cutesy fun, and more about Murphy actually addressing being older, being a father, and acknowledging his age and his peers’ retirement, including Deputy Chief Jeffrey Friedman, Paul Reiser’s unlikely rising character from the first movie who has become Foley’s boss. Foley and daughter get to work together to free Jane’s client, which necessitates proving Bacon’s bad guy is behind it all. Yes, the movie delivers all the parallels you want to the original (sorry, no banana in the tailpipe), all the cameos including the return of Bronson Pinchot (and even one by the last person to captain the Enterprise-C of Star Trek fame, Christopher McDonald), but you also get Murphy playing a believable, likable person, someone with an actual character arc.
So there’s not really a hand-off of Axel Foley. He’s still there. Although we see what could be a hand-off of sorts to Jane’s ex-boyfriend, an ex-L.A. cop played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Gordon-Levitt and Murphy get enough screen-time together as partners, you might as well chalk this up to buddy comedy status. Foley gets flustered and it’s funny. Foley gets outright scared and it’s even funnier. Gordon-Levitt uses this as a good opportunity to rekindle some of that screen humor from his TV days.
Key to the nostalgia and success of the movie is both well-placed excerpts from the original’s soundtrack and hip remakes of classic 1980s pop songs. It’s also easily the best action movie this year so far, the kind of trusty smash-’em up that will take you back to The Blues Brothers.
Imagine what another Cop Land movie would have been like. Or another Bullitt. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is probably nothing like those could have been, but it’s part of the same tradition, a tradition of action movies featuring memorable characters played by the best actors, characters audiences can’t get enough of, even if that means a sequel isn’t as great as the original. But even Die Hard never saw a sequel this good.
It’s been forty years since we first met Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, 34 years since we last saw him in the less successful sequel, Beverly Hills Cop 2, and 30 years since even fewer moviegoers saw him in the second sequel, Beverly Hills Cop 3. As much as it seems like Eddie Murphy has been away, he never really left, including movie appearances in hit series Shrek and The Nutty Professor, with major critical acclaim in Dolemite is My Name and a Christmas movie this past season, Candy Cane Lane, worth watching only because it’s fun to watch Murphy’s reactions on the screen. Like the big span between Coming to America and Coming 2 America, the American treasure that is Eddie Murphy, the most successful actor to come out of Saturday Night Live, is as good as ever.
Action, comedy, Eddie Murphy, and fun. Don’t miss Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, now streaming on Netflix.
