Eddie Murphy’s “Beverly Hills Cop” series focused on the Reagan era of the 1980s with riotous comedy. 40 years later, Netflix wants a remake with “Axel F”.
July 3, 2024, 8:03 pm
Your browser does not support playing audio files. Download the file as mp3
0.5×0.75×1.0×1.25×1.5×2.0x
83
Opinions
Summary Summary
This is an experimental tool. The results may be incomplete, out of date or even incorrect.
The fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie, “Axel F,” is on Netflix after 40 years. The film series, which started with Eddie Murphy as black undercover cop Axel Foley, has received an update that deals with current social issues such as discrimination and corruption. The film celebrates eighties pop music, but fails to do so in a humorless execution. However, it offers many references to fans of the old movies and a lukewarm family story.
text_length: 8311
text_tokenized: 2265
tips_token: 2272
Completion tokens: 135
total_marks: 2407
This audio version has been artificially created.
Back again – just with different jokes: Eddie Murphy as the police officer named “Axel F” in the Netflix sequel to the series “Beverly Hills Cop”.
© Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix 2024
Table of contents
Read on one page
Table of contents
page 1The movie we deserve
- Page 2Film for fans
They have been following for 40 years Beverly Hills Cop-Films the same pattern. All three (1984, 1987 and most recently 1994) begin with a situation in Detroit that has no role in the rest of the story. The black thoroughbred officer Axel Foley, who was playing Eddie Murphy, happens to witness a crime, which leads to a chase through the city. The sheet metal damage is maximum, the police cars are basically driving into the back of each other. Once that’s done, the funny, foul-mouthed cop travels to Los Angeles. It is there that he wins the hearts of the white police while ignoring the hierarchy. Together they turn LA upside down. That’s a search warrant, of course.
The film series was also famous for its soundtrack with monster hits such as The Heat is on by Glenn Frey, co-founder of the electro-soul act Eagles The Neutron Dance by the Pointer Sisters (for the chase sequences); and that’s surprising instrumental synth theme Axel F by German film composer Harold Faltermeyer. The legendary leitmotif for Detective Foley is now the title of the fourth film, now released 40 years after the first case Netflix running. For a long time it seemed doubtful that there would even be a sequel. 2015 was the main actor Eddie Murphy the third part as “garbage” and he said he would not make a quarter of the money.
If you watch the old movies again, you realize how difficult it is to save the series in the present. When not only the fat cars but also the satiated exploiters were dismantled in the final shootout in the mansions of the rich and the bad, this was surely understood as a free-wheeling, neoliberal 1980s coup: the main thing . Destroy as much capital as possible.
At the same time, the finger pointed at the establishment also supported him – not least the National Rifle Association (NRA), the ultra-conservative and powerful gun lobby in the US: “A man can never have too much firepower” Rosewood, a police officer who was friends with Foley, enthused in 1984.
Axel Foley’s character included open (and later less open) jokes about women, gays – and his imitation of black men “from the street”. In this role, Murphy has always been a figure of integration for white Americans working class.
What is the situation today, in 2024, in a country that, on the one hand, is more sensitive to discrimination, but on the other hand has become radicalized in many places? That’s the trick Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F The update definitely manages. However, at the price of a widespread lack of humor. Axel Foley went to therapy, or so he says (funnily enough, the topic comes up in the new cop movie too Dana’s boys with Will Smith). He no longer imitates black people, but speaks the matter Race in one of the rare, funny scenes: Foley is sitting with a white Detroit cop at an ice hockey game. The colleague thanks Foley a little too much for being with him. You must know that ice hockey is big in the United States and Canada, but black people are less likely to be seen in the audience than on the ice. Foley now plays on the white police’s panic about saying something racist and creates fictional black hockey teams. At the same time, Foley sees out of the corner of his eye that a gang is about to attack the stadium. And Zack! The chase begins. Except with an electric vehicle out of the stadium. But that serves as a quick joke, after all we are in the Motor City. The cops turn into fat snow plows, and in the end the robber is lying under a pile of metal, as he should be.
The Red Wings’ stadium is now located in the middle of a partially empty city, so the film looks a lot neater than it did in 1984, when it opens (to The Heat is on) Images of blatant poverty and decay were shown. The striking contrast between
Detroit and Los Angeles, where half of the jokes are in Cop Beverly Hills which is no longer between rich and poor, but simply in time. Cold here, hot there. Climate is never mentioned.