A Culture Clash Comedy in Search of a Culture
In 'Beverly Hills Cop Axel F,' being a Detroit cop transported to Beverly Hills doesn't produce the comedic contrasts it once did.
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Beverly Hills Cop was a mostly typical 80s cop movie built around a central culture clash: streetwise Detroit detective shows up in fantasy-land Beverly Hills to investigate a disappearance. Trying to recreate this fish-out-of-water premise 40 years later in a fourth sequel presents a number of problems. For one thing, the protagonist has spent three movies worth of time in Beverly Hills now, so it’s more like a second home than a foreign la la land. For another, Beverly Hills no longer has any cultural cachet as an exotic, unexplored enclave of the rich and/or famous.
A Detroit detective would no longer find himself walking around Beverly Hills shaking his head and marveling “Only in Beverly Hills,” because at this point we’ve all spent plenty of time in suburban developments full of tacky McMansions and upscale outdoor malls with overpriced fast casual food. You don’t have to live in Southern California to see a trophy wife with platinum hair and garishly plump duck lips driving a Range Rover to yoga anymore.
And so Beverly Hills Cop 4, aka Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (to which I will henceforth refer as “Beverly Hills Cop Promo Code AxelF”) has to try to gin up a new culture class conflict. The one it seems to have settled on is alternately “Axel is old now” and/or “cops can’t act like they did in the 80s (without people complaining).”
Whereas in the first, Axel Foley (starring a then 23-year-old, red hot movie star Eddie Murphy) was a cool young black guy clowning dorky old white guys, refusing to play by their rules and sticking bananas in their tail pipes, in 2024 he’s evolved to clown white people’s clumsy, corny attempts at racial sensitivity. Like in the first scene, set at a Detroit Red Wings game, in which Foley needles a younger Detroit cop for assuming he doesn’t like hockey. He references the “Negro Hockey Leagues” as a way to trick the white guy into saying “Negro” in front of a black guy.
The younger cop, played by Kyle More, is the kind of “fanboy” archetype we see constantly in the age of IP-driven cinema, a character as starstruck to be near the protagonist of the franchise in their fictional universe as I guess someone imagines us viewers would be in similar situations. From Sprite in Eternals (oh my gosh, are you the Avengers??) to Rose in The Last Jedi (oh my gosh, are you Finn??), this character always sucks, and yet franchises can’t stop using it. It feels like the IP cinema equivalent of canned laughter, based on an assumption that the audience won’t be able to let ourselves fangirl over the hero unless we see a character in the story fangirling first. Which is even funnier in the Beverly Hills Cop universe, because how many “famous cops” do you know? Oh my gosh, is that Darryl Gates??
Anyway, Axel and his worshipful protégé (the latter of whom embodies the 2024 equivalent of the dorky old white guy, the pudgy millennial with a beard) end up having to foil a robbery together. Some bad guys (black dudes with face tats) are there to… uh… steal NHL championship rings, I guess? Which leads to a full-on, bullets-flying shootout culminating in a chase sequence featuring Axel and the techie nephewling chasing down dirtbike-riding bad guys in a snowplow. FOLEY! shouts the captain the next day, the first of the roughly 67 times someone will shout FOLEY in Beverly Hills Cop Promo Code AxelF.
Director Mark Molloy, to his credit, actually shoots action scenes reasonably well (they have a sense of place and coherent action, something that constantly eludes modern action directors). Meanwhile, it’s never quite acknowledged that Foley just caused $50 million worth of property damage and endangered countless civilian lives in order to stop a decorative ring heist he probably could’ve better thwarted by emailing eBay.
Which, for the most part is fine. It’s not that goofy cop movies need to be strictly realistic or have good politics (please no), it’s more that this movie wants to have it both ways. It sets up a conflict it has neither the tools nor the inclination to address. People will tell Axel things like “you can’t do stuff like that anymore,” and Axel will make fun of the Beverly Hills Police for their “Lego car,” but when the local patrolmen pull guns and tell him to keep his hands where they can see them, Axel says, earnestly, “Hey, I know the drill, I’ve been a cop for 30 years but I’ve been black all my life.”
It’s a line that seems to sum up the confused non-idealogy of this movie, a fish-out-of-water cop movie in which you can’t tell what’s fish and what’s water. What does it mean when the cool, young black detective is still a cop but no longer young or cool? This movie has no idea. FOLEY!!!
The captain (played by Paul Reiser) falls on his sword, tells Axel to take a break and go see his daughter in Beverly Hills. The bearded fanboy disappears for the rest of the film (probably for the best). In barely 10 minutes of screen time, we’ve already had a shootout, a chase scene, Axel teaching a dorky white how to loosen up, and had scenes set to Glenn Frey’s “The Heat is On,” Bob Seger’s “Shakedown,” and plenty of the iconic Beverly Hills Cop score (bump BUMP bumpa bump bump, bump bump bump ba bup pa bump bump bumm…). If there’s one thing Beverly Hills Cop Promo Code AxelF makes you appreciate, it’s how great and inseparable from the films eighties film music was.
Out in Beverly Hills, Axel gets caught up in a police corruption plot, after his daughter (the very solid Taylour Paige) finds herself defending the nephew of a drug lord who was framed for killing an informant by some dirty cops. Axel has to unravel the plot to save the both of them, all while trying atone for having been an absentee father (“I sent you to Beverly Hills to protect you”). Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) is involved too, as a PI investigating the conspiracy, along with Taggert (John Ashton) who is now the chief of police. There’s also a buddy cop angle, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing Detective Abbott, Foley’s daughter’s sometime boyfriend.
Beverly Hills Cop Promo Code AxelF improves a lot after the opening sequence, once the story is actually allowed to breathe in between callbacks, but it still struggles to find the cultural conflict that would justify its existence. Is it that Axel is old now and can teach these whipper snappers some tricks? Is it that he doesn’t do this politically correct stuff? Is it that he’s black? Competent? From Detroit?
Sort of all and none of these things. Foley, Taggert, and Rosewood keep acknowledging and making jokes about their age, but none of them says a thing about the fact that they’re all over 60 with nary a grey hair in in the bunch (Reiser is the only one who has gone grey, and looks great). It’s not that these characters desperately need to look like old guys or be retired, but you’re telling me Axel, the incorrible ballbuster, sees leather-faced old Taggert sporting a Crayola dye job (in spite of his baldness) and doesn’t say a thing about it? Audiences can suspend disbelief, but it helps to know what we’re being asked to play along with. Are we supposed to know that they’re old or not?