1 star
A lot was happening back in 1984.
Ronald Regan is president.
The Detroit Tigers are the World Series Champions
Apple introduces the user-friendly Macintosh personal computer.
Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy’s fourth movie following the box office disaster known as Best Defense, opens in theaters and is a huge hit. Three years later, following the commercial and critical failure of The Golden Child, Murphy made Beverly Hills Cop II. When his romantic leading man films Boomerang and The Distinguished Gentleman don’t perform as expected, Murphy makes the desperately unfunny Beverly Hills Cop III.
They should have stopped then, but for some strange reason—greed, most likely—the corporations that own the rights to the character have cobbled together a new Beverly Hills Cop movie, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. It wasn’t good enough to get released in theaters, where it would have died a quick, probably unprofitable death, but it got shuffled off to a streaming service, where it can play in perpetuity.
The movie plays heavily on nostalgia, ignoring that generations of movie watchers have no clue who Axel Foley is or why he sounds so much like the donkey in the Shrek series. First-time director Mark Malloy was nine years old when the franchise kicked off forty years ago, so the idea of putting the band back together and using actors from the original films that were still alive in his ‘new’ story probably sounded like the right way to go. Unfortunately, while the 63-year-old Murphy still looks and acts like a movie star – albeit a slightly puffier, slower movie star, the rest of the old-timers just look old, and their performances are even older.
Casting isn’t the only thing being reused in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. The story, which took three writers to create, is a barely heated rehash of the stories that came before it. Detroit bad boy detective Foley violates about a thousand laws trying to arrest a band of thugs robbing the Little Ceasar’s Arena during a Detroit Red Wings game. Ten minutes of car crashes later, Foley decides he’d be better off facing the daughter he hasn’t spoken to in decades than face the repercussions of his actions, so it’s off to LA.
Yawn.
While the movie makers certainly go out of their way to capture the spirit of the original movie, they’ve forgotten that audiences, for the most part, have moved on. Car crashes can’t substitute for comedy. Nostalgia is not enough to substitute for originality. Adding a daughter for Foley to make the franchise fresh and meaningful is lazy.
