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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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is in trouble – but is it too big to fail?

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It’s on to its third reshoot and has lost two Batmans but is Jason Momoa’s protector of the deep destined for a watery grave? Warning: contains The Flash spoilers

Back in the 00s, the idea of making an Aquaman movie was deemed so ridiculous that the Hollywood bro comedy Entourage spent much of its second and third seasons taking the mickey out of the idea. In the end, Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) only agrees to star in the superhero epic because box office king James Cameron signs on to direct it.

This, of course, was long before the advent of the Marvel and DC superhero universes, which have since gone on to dominate multiplexes and prove that people really will turn out in their droves to see (for the most part) preposterously entertaining films about spandex-sporting titans as conceptually silly as Shazam!, Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon. During the peak of the comic book movie era, which on recent evidence appears to be long gone, it seemed as if almost any character from the pages of DC and Marvel could be spun off into their own big screen adventure. If Vin Diesel can be convinced to play a talking tree whose only utterance is “I Am Groot”, you know the creatives behind this are fully aware they are riding a gravy train to the land of psychedelic potentiality.

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