Bev­er­ly Hills Cop: Axel F review – gener­ic cop flick falls flat

I do not under­stand or com­pre­hend the val­ue of AI when it comes to cre­ativ­i­ty and art. It seems bizarre that there are peo­ple (main­ly vest­ed inter­ests) who actu­al­ly believe, on a lin­guis­tic lev­el, that a non-sen­tient appa­ra­tus could pro­duce some­thing that we could jus­ti­fi­ably be defined as ​“art”. But, as the old say­ing goes, the grift is real, and it’ll like­ly con­tin­ue until enough mon­ey is made.

One of the big crit­i­cisms of AI art is that it infringes all man­ner of copy­right laws, and that the final prod­uct is, in essence, some­thing that the AI thinks you want rather than some­thing that’s unique and expres­sive in its own right. The prob­lem with the new Net­flix sequel, Bev­er­ly Hills Cop: Axel F, is that you watch it with a sense of scep­ti­cism as to whether it would actu­al­ly pass the Tur­ing Test. It too often feels like the amal­ga­mat­ed prod­uct of a data mod­ule that’s had the pre­vi­ous three Bev­er­ly Hills Cop movies, and a cou­ple of TMZ edi­to­ri­als, fed into it and been charged with mak­ing a movie.

Aus­tralian com­mer­cials direc­tor Mark Mal­loy is the actu­al human per­son behind the tiller, but it’s hard to deduce as to whether or not he’s act­ing up to some kind of algo­rith­mic over­lord who’s call­ing the cre­ative shots. The film com­bines brazen fan ser­vice and eye-rolling nos­tal­gia call­backs with a Rizla-thin plot­line about vio­lent­ly cor­rupt cops lord­ing over the enlight­ened burg of Bev­er­ly Hills. Kevin Bacon is in the house to do his best stock bad dude. 

Eddie Mur­phy slips back into the famous var­si­ty jack­et and stonewash jeans as the lov­able face of police fas­cism, Axel Foley, a man whose predilec­tion for big guns, civic destruc­tion and above-the-law revenge mis­sions feel queasi­ly out of synch with mod­ern times. The plot­line is a beat-for-beat rehash of Mar­tin Brest’s still-scin­til­lat­ing 1981 orig­i­nal, with even many of that film’s music cues dredged up once more lest view­ers don’t get the memo.

Judge Rein­hold returns as the pup­py­dog NRA nut, Bil­ly Rose­wood, who’s hung up his cuffs for the LAPD and is now work­ing as a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor. A reunion is forged when he calls Axel to inform him that his estranged crim­i­nal lawyer daugh­ter, Jane (Tay­lour Paige), is in trou­ble, as one of her defen­dants may blow the whis­tle on some crooked stuff hap­pen­ing on the oth­er side of the thin blue line.

All the old friends are wheeled out for their moment: John Ash­ton as ​“I’m‑too-old-for-this-shit” Chief Tag­gart; Bron­son Pinchot’s loop­i­ly-accent­ed help­meet, Serge; and Paul Reis­er as Axel’s eter­nal­ly-dis­ap­prov­ing old bud­dy Jef­frey. Yet along with the actors, many of the scenes are retooled for the ser­vice of this lega­cy remix, albeit with mas­sive­ly dimin­ish­ing returns. Joseph Gor­don-Levitt is bussed in as the volatile Det Abbot, with whom Axel has to work, and the pair just don’t have any chem­istry going for them. Like, zero.

Where Foley was once wiley and per­spi­ca­cious, now he’s an egre­gious, acci­dent-prone goof­ball, a char­ac­ter shift which under­mines the orig­i­nal film’s tren­chant tac­tic of hav­ing the polit­i­cal pre­sump­tions of var­i­ous white char­ac­ters under­cut by real­i­ty. Mur­phy has been vocal in the past about his scep­ti­cism when it came to par­tak­ing in Cop sequels, par­tic­u­lar­ly the utter­ly mon­strous part three, yet it’s hard to see what, on paper, would’ve changed his mind with this one.

If nos­tal­gia porn is your thing, and you like this new fad of hav­ing the slight­ly tired stars of 1980s block­busters uncom­fort­ably reprise the roles that made them famous, then there’s much here for the tak­ing. Yet if the spec­ta­cle of a film high-fiv­ing itself from across the decades makes you feel phys­i­cal­ly nau­seous, and one that opts for minor vari­a­tions on a tried-and-test­ed for­mu­la over doing and say­ing some­thing, any­thing even vague­ly inter­est­ing, then hop into your bust­ed blue Chevy Nova, high­tail it past the Bev­er­ly Hills city lim­its and nev­er look back.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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