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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

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