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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The director who dared to tell uncomfortable truths: Lindsay Anderson at 100

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With films such as O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, the British auteur portrayed his country as a bleak dystopia in decline – what would he make of today’s Britain?

‘No film can be too personal,” declared Lindsay Anderson in the Free Cinema manifesto of 1956. A decade later he lived up to this slogan when he shot his elegy to youth rebellion If…. at his old school, Cheltenham College. Winning the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes film festival, it was the first in a loose trilogy of films that held up a mirror to a contemporary Britain that Anderson considered to be in a state of moral decline.

O Lucky Man! followed in 1973. Malcolm McDowell, who had played the chief rebel in If…., returned as a modern-day Candide who discovers that 1970s society offers very little grounds for his natural optimism. A brilliant score from Alan Price underpins the film’s bleak viewpoint. In the words of the title song: “If you have a friend on whom you think you can rely, you are a lucky man!” Perhaps paradoxically, Anderson had many friends on whom he could rely even if he didn’t think so and I was lucky that some of those friends became my friends, too.

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