Comedy all-timer Eddie Murphy relied on a combination of fish-out-of-water stories and oddball comic pair-ups when he jumped from small screen stardom on Saturday Night Live to big screen blockbusters in the early 1980s. In 48 Hrs. (1982), he plays a wisecracking convict paired with a grizzled detective (Nick Nolte) in a film debut that became an instant classic during the buddy cop genre’s biggest era.
In Trading Places (1983) Murphy plays a conman and Dan Aykroyd plays a spoiled trust fund brat before the pair find themselves changing roles and social positions in this hilarious look at wealth, status and unlikely friendships. And in Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Murphy gave audiences the perfect balance of both: a Detroit detective in Beverly Hills paired with peers like detective Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and sergeant John Taggart (John Ashton) who play the perfect straight men to Murphy’s smartass sleuth.
Detective Axel Foley — like Gumby and Buckwheat and Mister Robinson — feels like a character that Murphy was born to play. And the success of Beverly Hills Cop led to the establishment of a comic movie franchise over the following decade: Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) is directed by Tony Scott and features Axel returning to Beverly Hills to solve a string of robberies dubbed the Alphabet Crimes; Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) is directed by John Landis who’d previously paired-up with Murphy for Trading Places and Coming to America (1988). The third film in the franchise finds Foley heading back to the West Coast to bust-up a counterfeiting racket connected to an amusement park called Wonder World. Both of the follow-up movies look good on paper, but the second film was a pale copy of the original, and the third installment was greeted by a critical bloodletting and anemic receipts at the box office.
Whether Murphy and the Beverly-Hills-Cop-industrial-complex were in denial about the failure of the third film or just inspired to do better, there were plans in place for a Beverly Hills Cop IV movie way back in the 1990s. The film was delayed by years of chronic scripting woes while directors like Brett Ratner attached to and detached from the project, and a TV series about Axel Foley’s son failed to get beyond the pilot episode stage. It didn’t feel like we needed another Beverly Hills Cop film 40 years after the original, but now that we’ve got Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F we can see if an old fish-out-of-water can still learn new tricks.
“Axel F” is the title of electronic music composer Harold Faltermeyer’s signature theme from the original Beverly Hills Cop film, and it’s front and center in various iterations in this new film. The theme song, Judge Reinhold and John Ashton, and an opening shot of Axel in his blue Chevy Nova — much of Mark Molloy’s movie is designed to plug viewers back into the magic of the original film. Of course these are the elements that feel the most forced, cheesy and generally lazy. The introduction of Foley’s daughter Jane (Taylour Paige) as Axel’s new foil also feels forced at times as Jane is written as a two-dimensional cutout that seems only meant to shoehorn a strong female character into the cast. Her and Murphy have their moments of fun repartee but efforts to make this a more serious movie about their strained relationship only fall flat. That said, Murphy is really strong here, reminding audiences of his bottomless charm and knack for off-kilter performances peppered with stinging punchlines. There’s still lots of chemistry between Foley and Taggart and Rosewood, and even Foley and Jane make a compelling team when they stay focused on the case of a wrongly accused cop killer.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is now streaming on Netflix.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.