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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Fear the Night review – Neil LaBute on losing streak with atrocious home invasion thriller

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The director of In the Company of Men continues his run of terrible films with this awfully acted, ungripping drama

In the most dismaying possible way, Neil LaBute has done it again. The dramatist and film-maker who gave us the 90s toxic masculinity classic In the Company of Men and the interesting and undervalued Samuel L Jackson thriller Lakeview Terrace in 2008, seems now to be going through a period of churning out exploitation content like a hack-for-hire. Last year we had the dismal revenge horror House of Darkness; now it’s this terrible home invasion thriller, with awful acting, clunking dialogue cues and drearily ungripping action and suspense sequences, along with a ChatGPT-ish title.

Maggie Q plays Tess, a military veteran who has seen action in Iraq and is now a recovering alcoholic struggling with a return to civilian life. She agrees to come to her sister’s bachelorette party (despite being out of place with all the girly types), and the bride-to-be has implausibly decreed this should take place in the big old remote house once occupied by her recently deceased parents, a place where there is – in accordance with time-honoured movie tradition – no mobile phone coverage. They all show up and find themselves under attack for a bizarrely elaborate reason. Much later, a gloomy epilogue has a misogynist sheriff disbelieve Tess’s version of events, which is not completely unreasonable of him. It could be a screenwriting way of sneakily conceding how weirdly contrived it has all been.

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