Beverly Hills Cop: Axel Foley (2024, Dir. Mark Molloy):
The Laugh: ask someone to describe Eddie Murphy, and they’ll bring up his laugh—that knowing, overemphatic, infectious huh-huh-huh-huh. The laugh wasn’t only unique, it was also a statement of intent. Following in the footsteps of incendiary Black comics like Richard Pryor, Murphy’s brand of comedy was dangerous, touching on racial anxieties and sexual braggadocio, but his laugh was also a message to the audience: Don’t take this too serious, now.
That canny refusal to alienate, the need to both challenge and placate, characterized Murphy’s early career in movies. Sure he played roles calculated to provoke discomfort—a horny convict in 48 Hours (1982) who took pleasure in tormenting redneck assholes at the local bar, a street-smart con artist who becomes a plaything for mega-rich white men in Trading Places (1983)—but that ever-present megawatt grin and laugh were there to remind us that there was play as well as provocation behind his antics.
Which brings us to Beverly Hills Cop (1985), a genre exercise that became an unlikely cultural touchstone. Marrying a fish-out-of-water concept (Black Detroit cop mixes it up with hoity-toity racists and killers in LA) with slick execution, not only did the film catapult Murphy into the stratosphere, but it cemented producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson as the latest Hollywood hit-meisters. For the rest of the ’80s and beyond, mainstream cinema was dominated by Bruckheimer and Simpson’s template: roided-up action, synth-tastic scores, glossy cinematography, hit-heavy soundtracks, wisecracks dueling with roaring car engines and bursts of machine-gun fire. Beverly Hills Cop 2 (1987), directed by Tony Scott fresh off the pyrotechnics of Top Gun (1986), leaned hard on the gunplay, and the less said about John Landis’s Beverly Hills Cop 3 (1995) the better, but the original Cop still charms because of its casual energy, as Murphy improvises most of the film’s best bits, making the transition from edgy comic to ingratiating superstar as easy as a Ferrari shifting into fifth gear.
Since Cop, Murphy’s need to please has usually triumphed over his more anarchic instincts, his movies shading towards the family-friendly. (Indeed, his dual performance as cuddly Professor Klump and his crazed alter ego Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor (1996) concludes with the lovable, inoffensive Murphy triumphing over the motor-mouthed, in-your-face Murphy.) With every film that’s pushed the boundaries a bit (his bravura turn as ’70s comic and actor Rudy Ray Moore in 2019’s My Name is Dolemite), there’s been many more that have done just the opposite (The Adventures of Pluto Nash, anyone?). Now that the ’80s are back in vogue, with everything from Ghostbusters to Masters of the Universe to Murphy’s Coming to America getting a reboot or sequel, it was only a matter of time before Detective Axel Foley returned to the 90210 for more good-natured mayhem, and in the process just maybe reclaiming some of that raw, delirious energy.
Not that Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F believes that you can just go back to 1985 again, even if Murphy is looking as hale and healthy as ever. For one thing, The Laugh is dead and buried, a conscious decision by the actor to not give in to self-parody. And for another, the sight of a Black man B.S.-ing and blustering his way past stuck-up, condescending whiteys—the best riffs in the original Cop—isn’t quite as novel it used to be, so Murphy tones it down on confrontation in favor of dry sarcasm. (Instead of masquerading as a VIP to get a free penthouse suite at a ritzy hotel, he mutters “To hell with this, I’m just too tired” and pays the full $900 bill.) In a concession to its star’s age, much of Axel F’s action brawn is handled by Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a gung-ho detective, while Murphy’s big set-piece finds him driving an underpowered meter maid car. And just to drive home the fact that Axel is an older man with more grown-up problems, the film introduces his estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), who requires life-saving and honest parent-child communication.
But if these flourishes, along with a few cracks about Axel’s age, suggest a movie that acknowledges its star is wiser and mellower, do they make sense when it comes to a character like Axel, whose interior life was never the point? The original Cop and other blockbusters from that era appealed because they weren’t compelled to dig deep into their heroes’ psyches; Axel has always been less a character than a smoothed-out version of Murphy’s id, ready to yuck it up, play fast and loose, and blow away the bad guys as a matter of course. Axel F spends more time trying to flesh its titular character out, and while Murphy and Paige are likeable enough as father and daughter, their back-and-forth falls into cliché: she’s prideful and hurt about his neglect, he wants to reconnect but must learn how to be more responsible. Even the prime villain, a dirty cop played by Kevin Bacon, gets a monologue about why he is the way he is. All these psychological underpinnings are meant to give the film depth, but all they do is weigh it down when it should be more concerned with having fun.
Speaking of fun, Axel F makes a game effort to reproduce the fun of the originals, not only acknowledging but fetishizing the past. Director Mark Molloy and his scriptwriters follow the formula to a tee, opening with an overblown chase in Detroit before taking Axel on a bemused tour of southern Cali’s rich and loony, Harold Faltermeyer’s familiar “Axel F” theme following his every move as he quips with baddies and outwits snooty customer service employees, with a final shootout at a luxe mansion thrown in to wrap up all loose threads. Once again Murphy banters over the phone with his Detroit cop buddy Paul Reiser (who’s graduated to deputy chief) when he’s not hooking up with the usual suspects: Judge Reinhold’s loopy Billy, John Ashton’s dyspeptic Taggert, Bronson Pinchot’s fey Serge. Although all the characters have undergone life changes (Billy is a disgruntled private eye, Taggert is now chief of the Beverly Hills police department), the film doesn’t have much interest in delving into them besides a few scattershot jokes about Taggert’s blood pressure or Billy’s Rambo knife. Instead, it spends most of its running time pairing up Murphy with Levitt; too bad their interactions lack snap.
Snap, or the lack of it, defines Axel F. For every comedic action scene that nearly lands (the best is a chase involving an out-of-control helicopter), there’s plenty more that are rote in execution. Murphy is all too aware that he’s no longer the firebrand he used to be, and chooses to lay back instead of preen; it’s a straight-down-the-middle performance that avoids embarrassment but doesn’t generate much excitement. The same could be said for Molloy’s direction, which gets the job done but can’t juice up the film’s funny bits or energize its action beats. Still, one can’t blame the filmmakers too much for Axel F’s shortcomings; we now live in a chastened world where crime is more commonplace than exciting, cops who go around blowing people away aren’t looked upon too kindly, and stories about maverick heroes are very been-there, done-that. In such circumstances, even coming close to the original movie’s amiable ease would have been a miracle, and one can feel the strain as Axel F hustles hard but fails to attain that ease.
As it must, Axel F ends on a freeze frame, just like the original Cop, with Axel promising his buddies a good time, but while the 1985 Eddie Murphy leaves us with a Groucho-style raising of the eyebrows, the 2024 edition gives us the weariest of smiles. And yet, even though he’s ditched The Laugh and a good bit of his friskiness, one senses that Murphy might have another spicy movie or two left in him. Unfortunately, that movie isn’t Axel F, which is nothing more than a pleasant drive down memory lane that takes in the fading remains of over-familiar sights. ■
