As Eddie Murphy returns for another Beverly Hills Cop outing, here’s why Axel Foley makes for a surprisingly relevant hero in 2024…
Here’s a fun fact about 1984: look at a list of the films released that year, and you won’t find a sequel to Going My Way, Paramount’s comedy musical that was the year’s biggest earner 40 years earlier. Nor will you find a belated follow-up to Meet Me In St Louis, MGM’s Christmas musical that was in second place at the box office in 1944.
Wind the clock forward to the space year 2024, though, and cinemas have already seen a sequel to one 40 year-old film – Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which did pretty decent business in March. Ghostbusters was the biggest film at the 1984 box office, and although it has faltered at times, is still a popular (and valuable) franchise in the 21st century.
The second highest-grossing film of 1984, you may have gathered, was Beverly Hills Cop, the buddy-comedy thriller that cemented Eddie Murphy’s status as a star. Forty years later, and Murphy’s back again as the fast-talking Detroit cop Axel Foley in producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F – the first sequel since the shrug-inducing Beverly Hills Cop III, released in 1994.
So what gives? Has our culture stagnated to such a degree that 40 year-old film franchises can still find an audience when original ideas often don’t? In the 1980s, movies from the 1940s and 50s tended to re-emerge as remakes – the seventh highest grossing film of 1944, A Guy Named Joe, was remade 45 years later by Steven Spielberg as Always, for example.
What was singularly uncommon, though, was for movie stars to reprise the same role 40 years later, as Bill Murray and his surviving compatriots did in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, or Murphy just has in the new Beverly Hills Cop.
One simple reason for this is simple longevity – Bing Cosby and Judy Garland couldn’t have reprised their respective roles in sequels to Going My Way or Meet Me In St Louis because, god rest them, they passed away long before 1984. Eddie Murphy, on the other hand, is well preserved enough that he can still just about pass for a streetwise detective at the grand old age of 63 (as James Harvey noted in his review, his new movie is at pains to flag to audiences how young Murphy looks on multiple occasions).
Both Murphy and his Axel alter ego also work surprisingly well in a 2024 film because they lack the lumbering machismo of some other major movie stars of the mid-1980s. The also film’s makers seem fully aware of this.
There’s a scene in the new Beverly Hills Cop where Axel walks in on a bunch of bad guys rummaging through the apartment belonging to his old buddy, Billy Rosewood (a returning Judge freakin’ Reinhold).
Evidently a fan of vintage action cinema, Rosewood has an original poster of Rambo: First Blood Part II on his wall and a prop knife from one of the movies sitting on his shelf.
This is almost certainly an in-joke on the part of producer Jerry Bruckheimer and his collaborators, given that Beverly Hills Cop was almost a vehicle for Rambo star Sylvester Stallone; the problem was, Sly rewrote the script as a slam-bang action film with no humour, and even had Reinhold’s character killed in the second act. Possibly thanks to the plotting of co-producer Don Simpson, Stallone dropped out a couple of weeks before shooting was due to begin and Murphy was ushered in as a replacement. (Stallone went on to make First Blood Part II in 1985 and Cobra, which revived his script ideas from Beverly Hills Cop, the following year.)
The Rambo reference is worth singling out because, had Stallone starred in Beverly Hills Cop, it probably wouldn’t have been such a phenomenal hit. Nor would Stallone’s persona worked so effectively in a 2024 revival. Unlike Stallone, Murphy was never a hulking man of action; what Axel work so well was his relative lack of physical skill.
Axel was handy with a pistol and good at dangerous driving, certainly, but part of his appeal as a character was that he was never the toughest guy in the room. Unlike Stallone and his contemporary Arnold Schwarzenegger, who were more comfortable flexing their muscles or punching bad guys than talking, Axel’s superpower was (and is) his steadfast refusal to shut up.
It’s something Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F – directed by Mark Molloy and written by Will Beall – gets dead-on. Axel isn’t 22 anymore, but he still has the same ability to talk himself into and out of potentially deadly situations. He also has a cold reader’s talent for walking into a room and instantly figuring out what a person wants and how he can manipulate that desire to get the upper hand.
In this regard, Beverly Hills Cop is wish-fulfilment of a different sort from the usual action thriller; most of us would probably love to have the confidence to walk into any situation and immediately take charge, whether it’s in an apartment full of hoodlums or somewhere more mundane. Eddie Murphy is still better at bluster than just about any other movie star currently working, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else inheriting the Axel mantle with the same level of charisma.
This means that, while 1980s action stars are creaking at the knees, Murphy can still wear his baseball jacket and careen around Hollywood like it’s still the Reagan era. It’s a persona that, despite all the throwback synths (Lorne Balfe does a brooding, bassier remix of Harold Faltermeyer’s unforgettable 1984 score), feels strangely timeless. Perhaps it’s because, in an era of Instagram, influencers, selfies and relentless self-promotion, the self-assured and somewhat vain Axel F still fits right in.
Or maybe it’s because there’s a sense that, beneath all the ego and patter, Axel’s still just an ordinary guy. The scene in Judge Reinhold’s apartment ends not with a big, tough-guy punch-up, but with Axel spraying the villains in the face with a fire extinguisher, then making his escape in a traffic warden’s electric buggy. In other words, Axel is the opposite of Rambo – and that’s no bad thing.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is streaming now on Netflix.
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