With Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F we have yet another of those “keeping-the-franchise-alive-with-another-final-instalment-starring-an-ageing-wise-cracking-cop” movie.

The old cop in point is Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), an ace cop from Detroit returning to Los Angeles to settle a case that is probably too easy to solve, and much easier to screenwrite.

Axel, of course, has aged, though not by much, but that doesn’t stop the “getting-too-old-to-do-this” lines from wiggling their way into the story. The line is but one of the many cliches all “final” parts are obligated to include (see, for instance: Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Rocky, Bad Boys or even The Terminator movies). The other cliche is the estranged family member angle.

Axel’s daughter Jane (Taylour Paige) is a righteous defence attorney whose client is accused of killing a dirty cop. To scare Jane into dropping the case, Jane’s car is left hanging from a building — with the young woman inside it. Enter, of course, Axel — and a lot of silly and heard-it-all-before father-daughter exchanges — as he shakes things up.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F has many tropes and very little originality but still has a weird, nostalgic charm to it

To pile on the cliches, Jane is revealed to have been in a relationship with a righteous cop (Joseph Gordon Levitt), who partners up with her dad to bring down the bad guys.

That would be Kevin Bacon, playing another cliche: a high-ranking bad cop (screenwriters from all over the world, I beg of you: please, please, kill this stereotype!).

Axel F has many tropes and very little originality and, yet, despite the stereotypical nature of the plot, the film has a weird nostalgic charm.

Lorne Balfe’s retro-synth inspired score, featuring a reworking of the Axel F theme by Harold Faltermeyer (of Top Gun fame) and the songs The Heat is On (Glenn Frey), Shakedown (Bob Seger), Neutron Dance (The Pointer Sisters), and a mix of Hot in the City (Billy Idol), do a lot of heavy-lifting.

Disregarding the uninteresting editing (a blunder, actually), Eduard Grau’s cinematography — with its use of anamorphic lenses and intense post-processing (which I’m not a fan of) — manages to give the film a late ’80s look. The aggressive mix of sound and wide-screen visuals made the plotless films of the era look bigger than they were, and here they elevate one’s interest in Axel F.

Murphy, whose charisma singlehandedly holds this flimsy enterprise together, looks pretty darn young, especially when compared with his film-series’ co-stars Judge Reinhold, John Ashton and Bob Pinochet.

Serge, Pinochet’s character, gets to have a fun little sequence with a desperate Hollywood realtor (Nasim Pedrad, a hoot) when he leads the cast to check out a house on Beverly Hills that may clue-in Axel on some intel.

Gordon Levitt is utterly wasted, while Paige is mediocre at best, like Reinhold and John Ashton. Bacon, who seems to like the paycheck he is getting, hams it up as best as he can.

At one time, one felt that screenwriters (Danilo Bach, Daniel Petrie Jr., Will Beall, Tom Gormican, Kevin Etten) would be turning the anti-climax around with a dramatic reveal that would mess up one of the key characters of the franchise. That would have made the film interesting, and wrecked the long-associated nostalgia associated with the characters (ala Chip N Dale: Rescue Rangers).

Someone, it seems, had sense, because the film steers away from this new age mantra of messing up characters and franchise tropes.

In hindsight, that decision to stay unoriginal and cliched helps make the movie better than other (seemingly) last-parters of successful action movies (see the list of titles above).

Director Mark Molloy is no Tony Scott — a master of high-octane action films, who directed the last three movies of the series. None of the movies were great cinematic achievements, but the first two were fun (part 3 was worse than Axel F). With this logic, I guess Axel F should feel right at home with the previous movies by being a fun, mediocre continuation.

Streaming on Netflix, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is rated R and features scenes of action, violence and public property damage that’s typical of action-comedy movie series that hardly (if ever) get great reviews

Published in Dawn, ICON, July 14th, 2024