The experience of viewing these delayed sequels – the first Beverly Hills Cop was 40 years ago, man! – is akin to attending a typical Irish funeral. You get to see who’s still alive. You ponder how well some are looking. You worry about the cadaverous appearance of others. Here’s Paul Reiser, grey on top, but apparently fit, as Axel Foley’s old Detroit partner. Judge Reinhold still has that cheeky, angular grin. “You rocking a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, Judgy? They weren’t even around first time. They’re one of the new bands. Ha, ha! Shame about old ... Yeah, left us too soon. Where are the sausage rolls?”
Then there’s Eddie Murphy. The face is rounder than it used to be. He can’t escape a hurtling helicopter with the same comic grace. But the exquisite timing and gift for aghast sarcasm is still firmly in place. Even in worse rubbish than this he maintains a degree of dignity.
An implicit explanation for the delay in following up Beverly Hills Cop III turns up about halfway through. LA cops are looking through the records of Foley’s previous visits to their glossy city. Here he is in 1984. There he is again in 1987. “Ninety-four? Not your finest hour,” they say, shaking heads.
That John Landis episode was, indeed, easily the worst among the first three. The team behind the current adventure can take some comfort from the news that III remains (just about) the weakest of what is now a tetralogy. Only someone with porridge for brains would care a whit for the crime plot – some pony-and-trap about a missing memory card – or be even mildly astonished to discover which new cast member is the criminal mastermind.
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The project has that deadened will-this-do quality that distinguishes so much of Netflix’s output. But Murphy and two younger leads form an agreeable partnership in a good-natured romp that makes gallant, sometimes hilariously misguided, efforts to fit an eighties aesthetic around contemporary California.
Oh, yes. That plot? Well, because all American films are about difficulties with dad, Axel Foley, back in his home city of Detroit, has become estranged from his lawyer daughter Jane Saunders (Taylour Paige). When she falls foul of west-coast hoodlums in league with corrupt cops, our hero is summoned back to the posher bits of LA to help out in characteristically irreverent fashion. “I am a celibate,” he says pompously. “I did not need to know that,” Jane replies. Along the way, they link up with Detective Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and seek to bring down archetypal bent rozzer Cade Grant (Kevin Bacon).
Don’t get me wrong. Nobody hitherto unaware of the franchise would, watching Murphy, Paige and JGL squabble their way along Rodeo Drive, guess that Axel F was the latest episode in a smash comedy behemoth. But each actor is better than the material deserves. Paige, so good in Janicza Bravo’s Zola, manages to be permanently irritated without herself becoming irritating. Gordon-Levitt does good gruff. And Murphy reminds us, albeit at a lower temperature, what caused so many heads to laugh themselves off shoulders during his pomp.
For all that, there is no denying that the current project, directed by newcomer Mark Molloy, looks to have staggered out of another century (as indeed it has). Eduard Grau’s oily cinematography is in conversation with Tony Scott’s second episode. The humour is that bit less self-aware. The jaunty synth-pop accompanying action sequences feels as consciously archaic as did the Scott Joplin rags in The Sting. Come to think of it, that 1973 film was as distant from the Great Depression as we are now from the first Beverly Hills Cop.
Makes you think, doesn’t it? Not in a good way. Just like an Irish funeral.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F review streams on Netflix from July 3rd.
