Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024)

A couple of months after watching Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, I learned the film’s director was Australian. My earlier lack of inquisitiveness about the film’s director reflects a) the anonymity of its direction and b) Eddie Murphy’s default status as overriding auteur of the production. While Murphy has directed only one feature (Harlem Nights) and did not care for the experience, he's written numerous vehicles for himself and been the dominant authorial voice on many of his own projects. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is clearly a personal reclamation project, making up for the disappointment of Beverly Hills Cop III—largely of his own making—and of a piece with his other recent streaming-only releases (including fellow sequel Coming 2 America), a stratagem—much like Adam Sandler—for maintaining the veneer of superstardom without testing box office pull in the marketplace.

Lest I sound cynical, there’s a degree of thoughtfulness and pathos to the character etching in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, much like that other Jerry Bruckheimer-produced lega-sequel of late, Top Gun: Maverick. Like Maverick, Foley has aged without growing, which makes him simultaneously wildcard, throwback, and retrograde. It’s a pleasure seeing Murphy revisit this material, with welcome but deferential turns from co-stars old (Reinhold, Ashton, Reiser, Pinchot, that signature Harold Faltermeyer tune) and new (Kevin Bacon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and especially Taylour Paige).

And lest I sound disparaging, former commercial director Mark Molloy’s helming is polished, professional journeyman work, albeit beholden to the aesthetic constraints of Netflix and never testing its auteur-star’s comfort zone. Ultimately, his work here is in the same vein as Patrick Hughes's on The Expendables 3 and The Hitman's Bodyguard series. It’s nonetheless striking that its three predecessors were all directed by name (or soon to be name) directors in Martin Brest, Tony Scott, and John Landis. Of course, of those productions, only the first two I’d call true collaborations, and only the second was directed with any visual panache. Landis grouses that Murphy refused to play for comedy in Beverly Hills Cop III, deeming that Axel has become a grown-up, to the film’s detriment. I don’t doubt Landis was railroaded by his star, though in the same book Landis claims Oscar didn’t work (a lie!) because Sylvester Stallone wasn’t funny enough; as much as I appreciate Landis, when one star fails to be funny that’s unfortunate, when two fail to be funny maybe you’re the problem. Whatever the case, Murphy chose to be funny for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, and Mark Molloy probably had something to do with it, but also probably couldn’t have done much if he hadn’t.

Ben

The Return of Down Under Flix: Elvis (2022), Burning Man (2011), and Telegram Man (2011)

While it feels counter-intuitive, given its subject, to list Elvis (2022) as an Australian film, the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Awards (AACTA) expressed no qualms, awarding this US-Australian co-production Best Film, Director, and Actor, along with 9 other awards, a veritable sweep. AACTA also gave director Baz Luhrmann’s previous co-production, The Great Gatsby , the same top gongs and a slew of others nine years earlier. Ironically, Australia , Luhrmann’s most Antipodean-flavoured work since his breakthrough Strictly Ballroom , was nominated largely in craft categories by AACTA’s predecessor, the Australian Film Insititute Awards. Having said that, perhaps the best way to look at Luhrmann — indisputably our most successful working director and a truly internationally-minded one — is to treat him as our Sergio Leone. Much as Leone’s work is a product of both American Westerns and Italian cinema, so too is Luhrmann a filmmaker dabbling in American genres and stories ...

The Way, My Way (2024)

As someone on a perpetual two-to-three-year pop culture delay, it’s very rare I see a new film in theatrical release, let alone its first day of theatrical release, let alone a new Australian film on its first day of theatrical release. However, I had this opportunity for Bill Bennett's The Way, My Way (2024) . Bennett's film is also, by coincidence, the second film I’ve seen in as many months about someone making a pilgrimage along the famed Camino trail, the other being Emilio Estevez’s The Way . Both films, intriguingly, foreground their filmmakers in the screen story and provide onscreen surrogates for them: in The Way , Estevez appears briefly as a deceased doctor whose father—the film’s protagonist, played by Estevez’s real-life father Martin Sheen—embarks on the Camino trail to scatter his son’s ashes; in The Way, My Way , adapted from director Bennett’s autobiographical travel writing, Chris Haywood is cast as the filmmaker and follows in his director’s footsteps. ...

Season's greetings from DUF

Christmas gift hamper: Paul Goldman’s working-class noir Suburban Mayhem (2006) , about a femme fatale’s machinations to get her brother out of prison, starts strong but runs out of steam; despite a committed and star-making (in another film industry alas) lead turn from Emily Barclay, its diabolical streak eventually becomes tiresome. Much as Emily Barclay is the MVP of Suburban Mayhem , the wonderfully expressive Miranda Otto is the MVP of Love Serenade (1996) [1]. Shirley Barrett’s Camera d’Or winning film, about small-town sisters (Otto and Rebecca Frith) enchanted by the arrival of a new radio host (George Shevstov), is willfully offbeat and indefatigably charming. Little Australian film headlined by child star of beloved global blockbuster #1: From the star of E.T. and the director of Turkey Shoot ... While it’s unlikely E.T. would have survived the blood sport of Turkey Shoot , his pal Henry Thomas negotiates Trenchard-Smith’s Frog Dreaming (1986) intact. ...

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