‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.’: A boring old-fashioned film with which Eddie Murphy sinks a myth from the eighties | Culture

“Mr. Foley, I understand that you’ve been like this all your life, but the world has changed a bit,” a new generation police officer tells Axel Foley at one point. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, The late new installment of the saga starring Eddie Murphy, with three films produced in 1984, 1987 and 1994, respectively. A phrase that could well be used to say it not only to the character but to Murphy himself, a star of the eighties and early nineties cinema, long in decline or forgotten; to the film itself, a product much more flat than light, in a very different time from those unprejudiced eighties in which the first installment triumphed with its fusion of police, comedy and action; and even to the audiovisual world, since it is not even released in those movie theaters full of public but in the individuality of the home, via Netflix. The new Beverly Hills Cop It is an anachronism in every sense.

In 1987, the production duo of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer reigned in popular cinema in its broadest sense with products such as Flashdance and Top Gun. The first production of the series starring Eddie Murphy grossed $230 million in the US alone, after having cost $13 million, and was even nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay. Simpson died in 1996 at the age of 52, and although Bruckheimer remained at the top for many more years, it has been too long since he had a hit. Except for the infallible saga of Pirates of the Caribbean, Bruckheimer, who once again heads the production of Beverly Hills Cop At 80 years of age, he seems to have lost his touch and the most striking thing about his productions of the last two decades are the red numbers of Prince of Persia and, above all, of The Lone Ranger, with which Disney lost almost 200 million.

Mark Molloy, the director recruited to resurrect Axel Foley from advertising, is absolutely impersonal in his debut film. You only have to compare the freshness of the opening credits sequence of the first film, in which Martin Brest captured the social spirit of the street with the lightness of the cinema of the time, to start to miss that Dionysian essence. Axel F, The fourth installment of the series, it feels much more like a vulgar nineties police drama than any contemporary action production. At a time when the police drama has been almost banished from the cinemas, the new super detective There is only one option: that fans of the original work and of Eddie Murphy’s comic side (this critic did not go to those extremes either, in either case, except with The game is played among scoundrels, formidable resurrection of the screwball comedies classics) return to them with the adolescent enthusiasm of that time and let themselves be captured by the new variations of the famous electronic music soundtrack by the German Harold Faltermeyer.

Murphy, who already failed three years ago when he tried to revitalize The Prince of Zamunda, Nor has a script been written to match it. And despite the presence of some of the characters from the previous installments (the second, by Tony Scott, was adequate, but the third, by John Landis, my goodness, was infamous), and Kevin Bacon putting on villainous faces and walking like Kevin Bacon, the film has no choice but to play the cliché, like that of the suspended policeman who investigates a case. Meanwhile, in its intended touch of buddy movie, The legendary detective is accompanied by a lawyer daughter with an eternally angry expression, in one of the few contemporary nuances of the script. The last shot, a frozen image of the star, thus becomes the formal and metaphorical symbol of the deficient relic that it really is. Axel F.

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