Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F review – fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy chases past glories

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Murphy’s maverick cop – and his theme music – are back to fight corruption, but four decades on there’s little energy to enliven their formulaic reunion Eddie Murphy isn’t finished yet – as he proved with his barnstormer of a performance as Blaxploitation pioneer Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite Is My Name . But there’s something a bit tired and formulaic about this further go-around for his iconic Detroit cop Axel Foley from the Beverly Hills Cop action-comedy franchise which 40 years ago made Murphy an explosive Hollywood star – and whose catchy Axel F theme became an 80s anthem, duly revived here. He’s back for the fourth film, yet again leaving his Detroit turf to be a scruffy fish-out-of-water in the hilariously chi-chi world of Beverly Hills, yet again wryly noticing from the wheel of his car, on the way in, a montage of all the crazy California stuff, including a car registration plate reading: PRE-NUP. Axel’s grownup lawyer daughter Jane (Taylour Paige) is in Beverly Hills, menace
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Magazine Dreams review – Jonathan Majors is a marvel in bruising bodybuilder drama

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Sundance film festival: there are overly familiar shades of Taxi Driver and Joker in this grim character study lifted by a sensational central performance

It’s not hard to understand why Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) has anger issues. He’s working a low-paid job, living with and caring for his ailing grandfather, enduring micro- and macro-aggressions as a Black man in America and as he explains to a court-appointed therapist in the opening scene, he’s trapped in one of the country’s many food deserts, raging at a system that forces working-class people to eat themselves to death. And then there’s his primary passion …

Killian is an amateur bodybuilder, pushing his body to extremes in order to do something that he can be remembered by, something to be respected for, a way to separate himself from the trail of violence left behind by his late father. So he lifts and eats and lifts and injects and lifts and competes and lifts and punishes himself in order to ultimately be rewarded.

Magazine Dreams premiered at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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