Reprising his role as lovable undercover cop Axel Foley, the actor – and some full-on car-chase carnage – can’t disguise a plot several decades past its sell-by date in debut director Mark Molloy’s slickly packaged action comedy
It’s a full 40 years since maverick Detroit police detective Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) first found himself a fish out of water in the alien world of Beverly Hills, and 30 years since the franchise’s most recent instalment. As Foley revisits the west coast yet again for the fourth film, what’s remarkable is how little has changed. Sure, there are a few more wrinkles on the returning cast members (Murphy, who is comparatively well preserved, clearly relishes a running gag about how ancient and creaky his co-stars now look), but the plot could have been cut and pasted from parts of any one of the previous outings.
Foley creates havoc in a Detroit-based opening action sequence, decamps to the fanciest upmarket neighbourhood in Los Angeles (in this case, a threat to the safety of his adult daughter is the motivation), causes more havoc, falls foul of his bosses and finally saves the day, thus vindicating his unorthodox techniques and issues with authority figures. It’s not unentertaining – the blast force of Murphy’s charisma alone carries the picture, and that’s before you get to the bracing vehicular carnage of the chase scenes. It is, however, lazy, formulaic stuff that diminishes the brash brilliance and danger of the actor’s early career work.
It’s no secret that the people who control the purse strings on big Hollywood productions prefer a safe bet. Hence the voracious appetite for comforting, familiar IPs (intellectual properties), be they toys, video games, comics, TV shows, books or existing movie franchises. On the most basic level, audience familiarity with a property gives a crucial leg-up for the marketing department: it’s so much easier to sell a movie if there’s a pre-existing fanbase, or at the very least, enough name recognition to ensure that it glues itself into the collective consciousness.
The soundtrack is so dated, it might as well be wearing leg warmers and a ra-ra skirt
Of course, the fact that a film is based on an existing IP doesn’t necessarily mean that it will inevitably be bad. But those that succeed tend to be the ones that embrace risks. Greta Gerwig took Barbie, a toy that had all but become a punchline to jokes about unrealistic expectations of female beauty, and delivered a playfully political feminist treatise. And the rebooted Planet of the Apes series elevated the franchise far beyond the crude rubber facial prosthetics and the B-movie kitsch of the early films in order to hold up a mirror to the failures of human society.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are films such as Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the sorry consequences of the twin forces of nostalgia and creative cowardice. For all the wisecracking, profanity and staggeringly ambitious stunts – and this is a film that flings a helicopter around as if it were a Frisbee – Axel F is an overly cautious movie that takes a tried-and-tested greatest hits approach to all aspects of the film-making, from the plot onwards.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the score, which cannibalises much of the first film’s soundtrack. Axel F by Harold Faltermeyer features heavily, offering an instant dopamine hit to anyone who sneaked, underage, into the cinema in the mid-80s to see the original picture. It’s a mixed blessing though: the track is so dated, it might as well be wearing leg warmers and a ra-ra skirt.