©Courtesy of Netflix
After forty years, Eddie Murphy is still going strong as Axel Foley, the comic cop who traded the mean streets of Detroit for the meaner but greener streets of Beverly Hills. Murphy was an aspiring 22-year-old when he appeared in the original Beverly Hills Cop movie in 1984, which grossed more than $230 million at American box offices, becoming the most lucrative comedy of all time. In Beverly Hills Cop: Axel 4, which premiers on Netflix today, he proves you can teach an old cop new tricks, even if he’s 63 and a bit slower on the drawl.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F marks the directorial debut for Australian filmmaker Mark Molloy, who recalls watching the original Beverly Hills Cop film as a 12-year-old: “My uncle had a VHS player, which was rare where I grew up in rural Australia, and he put the movie on and I remember lying on the carpet watching it. I was just in awe. I’d never seen a movie like it, for one. But Eddie, Axel Foley, the jacket, LA, Beverly Hills, everything just felt so exotic to me. And I think too, I didn’t know it as a kid, but that balance of action and comedy, it was at the forefront of that. I had never seen anything like it. It just really stood out to me.”
This time round, Axel is thrust into a storyline that is both wildly madcap and quietly touching. The ever-solicitous Axel flees Detroit to team up with old pals Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Taggart (John Ashton) to help them crack a case involving violent gang members. When he arrives in sunny Beverly Hills, he finds that his estranged daughter, a no-nonsense lawyer named Jane Saunders (Taylour Paige), is being harassed by a Mexican drug cartel for defending a young man who has been wrongly accused in a gang murder.
©Courtesy of Netflix
Jane had been estranged from Axel for years, even changing her name from Foley to Saunders to express her discomfort with anything associated with the older man.
Though the father-daughter team initially can’t stand one another’s presence, they ultimately reconcile as he contributes his street smarts and she contributes her legal talents in the interest of truth, justice, and mercy.
Off-screen, Paige spoke fondly of the 1984 movie, saying “What I love about the original movie is how it’s a comedy, but the stakes are actually really high. It is light but even when you watch it now, it has this nostalgic grit to it with Axel out strolling in his jeans and his jacket and his Adidas ready to tackle what the day brings with charisma and swag and charm and gravitas.”
None of this is accomplished without a lot of bloodshed and mayhem set to the tune of classic Motown music, plus outlandishly choreographed car crashes, wild shootouts in Rodeo Drive mansions, and a hilarious scene involving a hijacked helicopter driven by a bumbling pilot who nearly crashes it with Alex aboard.
But all this would be mindless Three Stooges slapstick without the superb comic contributions of the star player. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is ultimately funny because of Eddie Murphy’s natural-born abilities to conjure up the ridiculous in the midst of mayhem. As director Mark Molloy put it: “Some of the funniest moments in Axel F are when Eddie’s improvising. For me, a big part of my job was to create the right environment, cast the right people around Eddie to allow him to do what he does best.”
©Courtesy of Netflix
Final Grade: A
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Here’s the trailer of the film.