Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F review – The heat is on… again

Stuck in development hell for literal decades, Eddie Murphy’s fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie is finally here. Murphy and first-time feature film director Mark Molloy missed a beat though by titling it Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, after Murphy’s street-smart Detroit cop Axel Foley, instead of just numbering it like the rest of the franchise. The simpler “Beverly Hills Cop 4” would have been a much better title for this Netflix production, not only for those with OCD tendencies, but because of just how smoothly this latest film falls into step with its classic predecessors.

As Glenn Frey’s “The Heat is on” blasts through your speakers while Foley engages in a wantonly destructive car chase with a snowplow – all filmed by Molloy with an appreciably retro practicality – you may as well have stepped into a time machine. There have been no reports of digital de-aging tech being employed, but it’s the only explanation for how Murphy still looks and moves the way he does. The 63-year-old actor has miraculously not missed a beat in the 30 years since we last saw Axel on-screen. His returning co-stars Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, and Paul Reiser can’t quite say the same thing, but screenwriter Will Beal actually leans into this instead of having us believe all these old guys discovered Murphy’s fountain of youth.

It’s not all fan-service casting though. There are some new additions to the franchise, most notably Taylour Paige, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Kevin Bacon. And it’s Paige’s Jane Saunders, Axel’s grown-up daughter who now lives in Beverly Hills, that is at the centre of the film’s narrative.

It’s been three decades since the Wonder World incident (“Not your finest work”, a character remarks in a bit of meta-commentary on the poorly received Beverly Hills Cop 3), and Foley is still a detective working the streets of Detroit. After his latest bit of motorized mayhem results in his longtime friend Deputy Chief Jeffrey Friedman (Reiser) being pressured into retiring, it’s suggested Axel take time off to reconnect with Jane, who he has not spoken to for years. Taken under the tutelage of Axel’s friend Billy Rosewood (Reinhold) – who has retired from the Beverly Hills Police Dept and turned PI – Jane is now a high-profile criminal defense attorney. And as Axel is informed telephonically by Rosewood, Jane’s latest case, defending a young man accused of killing an undercover cop, has placed her in grave danger.

After an attack on Jane’s life, Axel heads out to Beverly Hills only to discover that Billy has gone missing while looking into the case. Axel turns to his other friend and Rosewood’s old partner John Taggart (Ashton), now BHPD Chief, for help, but he’s more interested in introducing Axel to Captain Cade Grant (Bacon), his erstwhile golden boy protege and now the head of the BHPD narcotics task force. Grant is far too slick and expensively attired for Axel’s liking, and it’s not long before something begins to smell rotten in the state of Denmark California.

Teaming up with a reluctant Jane and local Detective Bobby Abbot (Gordon-Levitt) – Jane’s ex-boyfriend, much to her father’s chagrin – Axel has to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of the BHPD. And if you can’t figure out said conspiracy halfway through Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’s 118-minute runtime, then we really need to talk.

The filmmakers know that a Beverly Hills Cop movie, even a modern one, doesn’t need to go crazy in terms of its story twists, though. The scripts of these affairs have always been rather straightforward. The mysteries are never too deep; the ramifications never too widespread. And once again that’s the case here. For longtime fans, this will feel like slipping into that old band t-shirt you had to dig out of the back of the cupboard, and finding it still fits perfectly. Mileage may vary for modern audiences raised on $200 million globetrotting Netflix green-screen-fests, where one painfully good-looking A-lister betrays another every few minutes as they blow various cultural landmarks to smithereens.

To be fair, Axel F could have done with just a bit more bombast on the action side. Molloy, an Australian commercials director prior to stepping behind the camera here, does nothing wrong, but there’s also not much that is particularly cool and memorable. Bad Boys for Life directing duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah were once attached to helm Beverly Hills Cop 4 in one of its many past iterations, and they likely would have put a much more dynamic spin on things.

It’s a good thing then that Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is very much more Murphy’s movie than it is Molloy’s. Wearing the producer’s hat as well, this has been a decades-long passion project for the star and the commitment shows. Axel’s hugely entertaining motormouth shenanigans, as he talks himself into and out of trouble, is vintage Murphy, right down to the R-rated language. Outside of Samuel L. Jackson, no other actor in Hollywood can deliver a foul-mouthed barb with quite the comedic effect (a trademark of Murphy’s early standup comedy days) and he’s perfectly in his element here.

It’s not all F-bombs and shootouts though. There’s also a subplot of Axel and Jane overcoming their personal drama and reconnecting as family, and again Murphy delivers the goods. It’s a strong reminder of why he used to be one of Hollywood’s top leading men. The much less experienced Paige doesn’t quite match his emotional consistency though. Similarly, she also doesn’t quite have the spark with an underutilized Gordon-Levitt that the movie seems to think she does.

It’s these kinds of missteps and a few silly plot beats, along with the aforementioned mundanity of the action, that keeps Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F from being the blow-out blockbuster that Netflix wants it to be. What we do get is a nostalgic throwback that doesn’t just rely on said nostalgia for a good time. It’s not often that franchise revivals this long in the tooth get things this right. Must have been some of that fast-talking Axel Foley magic that made it happen.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is out now on Netflix.