‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ review: Eddie Murphy’s boyish wit is missing

Thirty years on from Beverly Hills Cop III, Eddie Murphy is back as Axel Foley. The renegade Detroit cop was always one of the actor’s stand-out roles – at least when it comes to the original 1984 movie and its 1987 sequel. This belated fourth outing is all too aware of what went wrong. In one amusingly meta moment, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Beverly Hills law enforcer is reading out Foley’s history in the wealthy Los Angeles district. When it comes to 1994, he says “Not your finest hour”, a surefire wink to the fact that the third instalment, all set around a theme park, was a total disaster, torpedoing the franchise until now.

Thankfully, Netflix-backed Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F takes a step in the right direction, capturing something of the grit of the first movie. Underlining the fact, it starts out in freezing Detroit, where Foley still works, before bringing up the titles with a blast of Glenn Frey’s ‘The Heat Is On’, the euphoric track from the original film that was so quintessentially ’80s. Plenty of the support cast are back too, in a story that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Foley is on the hunt for the thugs who have threatened the life of his estranged daughter, Jane (Taylour Paige), who works in Los Angeles as a defence attorney.

After she’s almost dropped in her car over the side of a parking lot, Foley gets a tip-off from his old pal Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), who has left the Beverly Hills police under a cloud. He’s convinced his old department is riddled with corruption, with Kevin Bacon’s oily, Rolex-wearing Captain Grant chief among the suspects. But before Foley can jet into town, Rosewood disappears, leaving our hero to seek him out and repair his relationship with Jane, who wants nothing to do with a father that was never there for her.

While Foley is forced to team up with Gordon-Levitt’s competent Detective Bobby Abbott, who happens to be Jane’s ex, he runs into some familiar faces, including Rosewood’s old partner John Taggart (John Ashton) and Serge (Bronson Pinchot), the high-pitched ex-art dealer – who here gets to show Foley around a glam LA mansion. Luis Guzmán, of Boogie Nights fame, also turns up as an OTT criminal who is first glimpsed singing karaoke to Hall & Oates’ ‘Maneater’.

Directed by Australian commercials director Mark Molloy, making his feature debut here, the film is strong on action sequences – old-school shoot-outs, with goons tumbling off balconies and chases through the streets of Beverly Hills. It’s clear that Molloy has absorbed the style of the first two movies, without his version feeling like a pastiche. There’s even a helicopter stunt that nods to Die Hard, that other classic cop-out-of-water-in-LA film from the ’80s. In truth, the film isn’t quite as funny as you might hope. Murphy’s youthful cheekiness has long gone, stripping this sequel of some of its verve. But this is still an enjoyable, affable reunion: the heat is just about back on.