‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’: Eddie Murphy Hearts the Eighties. A Lot

Nostalgia — it AIN’T what it used to be. Right around the halfway mark of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, a.k.a. the fourth time out for Eddie Murphy‘s streetwise detective, our man Axel strides to the front desk of a posh L.A. hotel. He’s rockin’ his usual Detroit-plainclothes-chic uniform of varsity jacket, T-shirt, jeans and white sneakers. Seeing Murphy, who looks better at 63 than most of us did at 33, in his old get-up is already enough of a time-machine nudge on its own. Now he’s about to scam his way past yet another gatekeeper to Snootsville, USA, SoCal division.

Foley introduces himself to the clerk as Nigel Applebottom from Bon Appetit magazine, affecting a slightly fey British accent. (Not too fey, mind you — Murphy has spent the last few years atoning for past sins in his stand-up act, and while he’s channeling his old roguish charm, the actor is not looking to reopen old wounds.) He’s winding up some elaborate story that will likely get him a penthouse suite for peanuts. Then Foley stops, takes a beat and says, in his normal voice, “To hell with this. I’m just too tired. Do you have any rooms available?” After he’s quoted some outrageous price, Foley smiles and replies, “I love Beverly Hills” with the maximum amount of sarcasm legally allowed to grace a sentence, and then it cuts away as Harold Faltermeyer’s famous synth theme starts playing into the next scene.

It’s one of the funniest moments in Axel F, partially because it’s one of the most shocking in a sequel (four-quel?) designed to be as comfort-food-predictable as possible. But it’s also the movie’s most dissonant scene, because it’s not like Murphy has been phoning any of this in or treating his belated return to the role that made him a megastar as a matter of fulfilling a contractual obligation. He isn’t winking or nudging the audience in the name of some sort of fourth-wall complicity, à la “Aren’t we all too tired for this, folks?” Murphy’s admitted that he’s been trying to make another Beverly Hills Cop movie since the late 1990s, and with the wonderful third-act career boost he’s pulled off since 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name! reminded everyone that he’s a national treasure, he saw his opportunity. Murphy does not seem “too tired” to don the varsity jacket and run around Rodeo Drive again at all. It’s everything else regarding this Netflix trip down memory lane that feels exhausted.

Out of a sense of professional duty, we’ll sketch out the basics. After foiling a heist at a Red Wings game in his hometown of Detroit Rock City — because who doesn’t love a good old-fashioned snow plow-vs.-ATVs car chase — Foley gets a phone call from his old pal Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold). Billy left the force ages ago and is now a private investigator, and he thinks he may have stumbled onto a corruption scandal involving Beverly Hills’ finest. More importantly, he believes that Foley’s estranged daughter, Jane (Zola‘s Taylour Paige), may be in danger; she’s a lawyer and one of her clients knows too much, which puts her in the crossfire. So Axel hightails it back to his old stomping grounds, complete with a montage of Hollywood eccentrics and rich assholes updated for 2024. There’s a tiny SoundCloud rapper surrounded by four giant bodyguards! And there’s a lady feeding her Pomeranian sushi! L.A., you’re so crazy!

Foley gets suspicious when Billy doesn’t pick him up at the airport, and sure enough, a trio of thugs are at his friend’s apartment, tossing the place. Our hero escapes but gets picked up by the police, and wouldn’t you know it, his other old friend, Taggart (John Ashton) is now running the precinct. Foley meets Det. Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who’s read Axel’s file and, coincidentally, knows Jane in, shall we say, the biblical sense of the word. He also gets questioned by Captain Grant, who immediately radiates bad-guy vibes because he’s a) slimey, b) Kevin Bacon, and c) played by Kevin Bacon in the slimiest way possible. So now Axel has to find his M.I.A. buddy, avoid Grant’s minions and the greater BHPD, mend fences with his daughter — who is not happy to see him — and recruit both her and her ex Abbott to help him root out the villains. If he happens to crack wise to some mucky-muck caricatures and do whatever passes for putting a banana in a tailpipe in the 21st century, hey, he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.

So yes, even though Axel-slash-Nigel-Applebottom is too fatigued to sweet-talk his way into a free hotel room, he will still hoodwink, say, the occasional impound clerk to get some info. Franchise side players such as Paul Reiser‘s long-suffering DPD bureaucrat and Bronson Pinchot’s Euro-fop Serge show up and do their respective things. Most resuscitated film series might nod to past highlights, but Axel F goes the extra step of trotting out not just Harold Faltermeyer’s semi-iconic theme but Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On,” the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” and Bob Seger’s “Shakedown” from the BHC 1 and 2 soundtracks. The action scenes feel like they, too, might have been lifted directly out of 1980s movies, in the same way that AI can replicate familiar things yet always manages to get a few key elements wrong. We can’t confirm this, but we’re 90-percent sure that first-time director Mark Molloy got the gig because his name was picked randomly out of a hat.

The only element that makes this throwback even slightly north of insufferable is Murphy, which is no surprise since these films were always designed to be showcases for the comedian to do what he does best, i.e. deliver a supersized version of Eddie Murphy, Superstar. For folks who only knew him as the voice of Shrek‘s smart-ass donkey or the name above the title of a lot of kids’ movies, the idea that Murphy was not only the most groundbreaking and dangerous comic but the biggest celebrity on the planet might seem incredible. Those who saw him go from SNL MVP breakout to 48 Hrs scene-stealer, however, remember when the twentysomething from Bushwick, Brooklyn, was poised to break in the most Mt. Olympus-sized way possible. That first Beverly Hills Cop changed everything — for Murphy, for comedy, for the movies.

Just because he went back to the well a few more times with diminishing returns (even Murphy thinks 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop III was a letdown) and wanted to do the neutron dance again, only this time as an éminence grise victory lap, doesn’t mean Murphy is treating this anything less than seriously. He’s bringing the charm, the screen presence, the spin on a line that makes it pop. He’s propping up this Netflix-sponsored nostalgia-bait as best he can. Every so often, like when he sings a quick bar or two of Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair” to Paige, you can see the old Murphy magic shine through. But BHC: AF still feels like you’re watching a former big man on campus return to his 40th high school reunion. This is a movie that doesn’t just heart the Eighties. It actually wishes it still were the Eighties, casting a fond glance to a simpler, more star-driven blockbuster era. Two hours later, however, and the thrill of getting this particular banana in your tailpipe feels like the most distant of memories.