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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‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’ Francis Ford Coppola’s 40-year battle to film Megalopolis

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The director has spent half his life and $120m of his own money to make his sci-fi epic. Just days ahead of its debut in Cannes, some of his crew members are questioning his methods

‘My greatest fear is to make a really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject, and I am doing it,” Francis Ford Coppola said in 1978. “I will tell you right straight from the most sincere depths of my heart, the film will not be good.” The film was Apocalypse Now, and it was good, and the rest is history.

Part of that history has been Coppola’s reputation as an intrepid adventurer who was prepared to risk everything, to defy the studio suits, to go to the brink of ruin and madness, all for the sake of art. The making of Apocalypse Now cemented that legend – the epic scale, the jungle insanity, the heart attacks, the unbiddable weather and even less biddable actors – all of which was captured by his wife, Eleanor, in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness. Coppola’s anti-establishment approach has produced some of cinema’s greatest triumphs (The Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, Dracula) but also some of its worst failures (One From the Heart, The Cotton Club).

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