Axel Foley is back in Beverly Hills, and so is Eddie Murphy.
“Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” director Mark Molloy set out to make a film with the same feeling and tone as the 1984 classic “Beverly Hills Cop” and its 1987 sequel, “Beverly Hills Cop 2.” He calls the latest film in the franchise “my love letter to the first two films.”
Molloy recruited Jahmin Assa, the film’s production designer, to pay tribute to those earlier chapters in numerous ways. Assa’s goal was to create something that made “Los Angeles feel timeless and as fresh as it did in the 1980s,” and that included shutting down city streets in Detroit and Los Angeles to finding the perfect location to execute a 1980s-style mansion shootout for the film’s third act, and crash landing a helicopter in Beverly Hills.
The film opens with Foley back in Detroit sitting behind the wheel of his 1970s blue Chevy Nova as Glenn Frey’s “The Heat is On” plays.
That callback to the original started on the page in the script by co-writers Will Beall, Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten. Frey’s song opened the original film, and by bringing it back here, Molloy said, “I wanted the audience and fans of the franchise to think, ‘This is exactly where I want to be.’”
In the big action sequence that follows, Axel drives a snowplow through the streets of Detroit in pursuit of the criminals he’s chasing. It echoes the first sequence in the original film, where Axel attempts to stop a stolen truck filled with illegal cargo while police cars chase the truck — and him — through Detroit.
The idea was to show that Axel was still the cop audiences remembered, and nothing about him had really changed. “I wanted to show his cavalier ways — that how he goes about things doesn’t really work in the modern world anymore,” Molloy explained.
It also gives new audiences a chance to understand the attitude and perspective that Axel brings to life, much less to serving as a policeman.
Assa indicated that the production took over the streets of Detroit. “We scouted and shot in Downtown Detroit. We made a grid where we could cause as much destruction and mayhem as Axel does in that mischievous and great way.” He added, “We tried to hit many of Detroit’s iconic sort of downtown landmarks.” As the chase comes to an end, Axel crashes the snowplow through a pile of garbage.