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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November review replay of Bataclan terror response is good PR for French cops

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Cédric Jiminez’s focus on police operations in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks doesn’t give a real sense of who any of the agents involved are

Artistic responses to the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks – including You Will Not Have My Hate, Paris Memories and the excellent You Resemble Me – have rightly erred on the side of the contemplative, though even that couldn’t excuse last year’s soft-rock stage musical For You I’d Wait. With November, the director and co-writer Cédric Jiminez, who excavated the origins of The French Connection in his 2014 thriller The Connection, zeroes in on the police operation in the immediate aftermath of the attacks when the terrorists were still on the run. Jiminez’s Connection star Jean Dujardin oversees the hunt, calling his wife to say “Give the kids my love” before five solid days of barking at suspects and pointing at maps.

Deploying the standard Jason Bourne vocabulary of swish-pans, shaky-cam and jittery editing, the film mercifully avoids restaging the attacks themselves and instead catalogues the surveillance operations, false leads, interrogations and high-speed pursuits. Despite reliable work from a wiry-looking Jérémie Renier as a scowling cop and Anaïs Demoustier as a novice agent, we don’t get to know much about these (fictional) heroes who are pulling pizza-and-Alka-Seltzer all-nighters. A gun-runner (Hugo Dillon) with a colourful if dubious defence – “Don’t blame my Kalashnikovs, blame pussy politicians!” he fumes – comes more sharply into focus than anyone else here.

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