This is one of my favorite 3 star reviews I’ve given out in a long time. I was dead certain the combination of Netflix lazy IP grabs and Eddie Murphy’s even lazier moviemaking the past 3-4 years was gonna lead to Axel F being a disaster. To my great surprise, Mark Molloy, Murphy, and the rest of the cast legitimately cared about Axel Foley, and went about crafting essentially a greatest hits album that will bring a smile to any 80s kid who worshipped young Eddie and all of the joy his swagger brought audiences everywhere. We weren’t gonna fall for no banana in no tailpipe here!
20 years on since the last Beverly Hills Cop, Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is still doing his thing: he’s Detroit’s best and worst enemy, always getting his man, but in the process, maybe stealing salt trucks for insane car chases that cause a lot of damage and get now Chief Jeffrey (Paul Reiser) in deep water with the city. After this latest case is closed, Axel finds out his estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), living in Beverly Hills, has run afoul of the wrong people, putting her life in danger. He flies back out to the 90210, putting himself into the middle of Jane’s predicament, and on a collision course with Detective Bobby Abbott’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) investigation…and maybe a few of his old friends like Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Taggart (John Ashton).
Props to Mark Molloy and the writers for getting the character balance just right. A lazy remake would just reboot the story, go through the motions with the same characters in the same place, and get out of there. With Axel F, we’ve moved forward in time: Axel is doing his detective thing, but everyone else in his orbit has moved onto different places in life, changing up the beats a bit because Axel’s now talking to superiors instead of peers. In addition, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and especially Taylour Paige bring some exciting new energy to the proceedings, but feel completely at home in this Beverly Hills Cop world. Levitt does the dutiful partner thing, letting Eddie run the show and just reacting to his incredible energy, but Paige gives and much as Eddie does: the scenes with the two of them are the best scenes in the movie, with them just sniping at each other, fearlessly. All the 80s characters aren’t quite as ready for a fight as Axel, so the script deploys them in small spurts, so we get these little nostalgia hits here and there when the movie slows down to chat for a minute or two.
The other reason this Beverly Hills Cop works is, well, cause it actually feels like a Beverly Hills Cop movie. Unlike the Road House remake, which polished out the dirty sincerity of the original, Axel F keeps the essence of the original in tact: this is a police detective trying to crack a case…but with pizazz. Most of the scenes here are Axel and Jane finding some new piece of information, a confrontation with the bad guys, and then the fallout with the police department. Lather, rinse repeat. The big action sequences here feel pretty practical, including an incredibly staged helicopter chase with a wonderful punchline of an ending, as well as some brutal, direct bullets to the head for the bad guys, something that usually gets drawn out in other movies. And when the guns are in the holsters, all our heroes are 2 steps ahead of everyone, and get into screaming matches with police management, who is mad but secretly loves the brass behavior to bring someone to justice. In the 80s these sequences would have been edgy and boundary pushing. Here? They wash over Beverly Hills Cop fans with nostalgia, as Mark Molly essentially made an 80s action comedy in 2024.
Darn it, Eddie. I was so ready to just be out on anything you made going forward. But Axel Foley just sucked me back in. Actually, that’s only partially true. I love vintage Eddie, but I’ve also grown quite fond of Taylour Paige the more I see here. She was ready for Axel F thanks to the unhinged Zola, which you should see ASAP, it’s a lunatic blast.