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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Inside Out 2 review – Pixar returns to emotional Mission Control for Riley’s teen years

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Anxiety, Joy and Ennui join the crew as Riley navigates high school, a hockey camp and zits – but where’s Lust?

The first Inside Out took us into the Mission Control operations centre within the mind of a kid, and showed us the five emotions amusingly piloting her every decision – Joy, Fear, Rage, Disgust and Sadness – as well as all sorts of dizzyingly intricate detail about memory balls and personality islands. Now the sequel-upgrade brings us up to the teen years with a whole bunch of new emotions. There are some laughs, but it sees the teen transition in terms of a moral crisis, of abandoning and then reclaiming the niceness of childhood innocence; it’s a little bit convoluted and repetitive and, in its sanitised, Disneyfied way, this film can’t quite bring itself to mention the most important new teen emotion of all. Have the grownups in charge of this film really forgotten?

One of the original film’s smartest implied gags was that the story stopped just before the puberty crisis, represented by an alarm-red panic button on the dashboard, when all the worries and upheavals we’d just been through would be supplanted by an unimaginably painful new array of problems. Well, now that moment has arrived – Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) is now 13 years old (with what looks a microscopic zit on her chin that apparently doesn’t bother her in the least). She is due to start high school, and along with her two best friends is heading off to a prestigious ice-hockey camp. But when Riley discovers these two girls have kept a secret from her, she is upset and confused and figures she has to outgrow them and start hanging out with the hockey camp’s supercool older stars – led by Valentina “Val” Ortiz (Lilimar) – which in turn upsets her old friends.

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