When my dad watched rated R movies during the day, he kept the remote handy, his finger hovering over the fast-forward button in the likely event boobs popped up on the screen.
In the 80s, boobs were basically required.
I’m not complaining, but Dad’s fast-forward reflexes are pretty much all I remember about the first Beverly Hills Cop film when it came out on VHS.
It wasn’t one of my favorites and obviously I wasn’t the targeted audience. But my dad liked it, and so did most everyone else. So when the latest sequel dropped—40 YEARS after the original—I was curious enough that I decided to watch them both back to back.
Just Another Reboot?
Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy has brought us a deluge of sub-par sequels and reboots of previously successful franchises, and I was worried Axel F would be another one of them. After all, Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America sequel was less than stellar.
HOWEVER, he righted the ship with this one in a big way. For one, he used nostalgia perfectly, even going so far as to use the old Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer title card (after Don Simpson’s death in 1996, the title card changed on subsequent films). The opening sequence of Axel F is once again exterior shots of Detroit, using the same song as the original. It looks more positive, more hopeful.
Instead of Beverly Hills Cop’s candid shots of actual Detroit residents and the derelict buildings dotting the landscape, the opening for Axel F used actors and kept the shots to mild, poverty-ish scenery, vs the absolute wreckage that blights real Detroit. It was a creative choice, as the first movie was designed to show the disparity between Detroit and Beverly Hills. That’s not the focus of Axel F.
This time our titular character is drawn to Beverly Hills not by the death of a close friend, but by a threat against his daughter, who is an attorney trying to clear an innocent man.
His daughter, Jane, is a good character. I like her. But as I watched the movie, it became increasingly clear that this movie was about her. Not her dad.
The Covert Main Character
How can this be, you ask? It’s called Axel F. It must be a movie about Axel, right? Not when you look at the story itself. Yes, Murphy has the most screen time. They didn’t sideline him. But Jane is one who moves the story forward.
It’s her pro-bono case and her attack that is the inciting incident.
She is the one who works through unresolved issues during the course of the movie
She is the one who makes the necessary connections to solve the case
Axel and Jane have been estranged for a while, to the point that when Axel is arrested (after genuinely hysterical hijinks), she hangs up on him when he calls her to come bail him out.
She hangs up on her dad. Who came to town to help her. We also find out she changed her last name to Saunders, even though her mother never remarried. Jeez, he must have done something really bad, right?
Obviously, Jane relents and comes to get Axel, begrudgingly working with him to help clear her client and take down the cops who framed him.
But she makes it clear that she is NOT cool with her dad, even after they have some great moments together working as a team. She is every bit her father’s daughter.
A Daughter Realizing She’s Grown
So what did Axel do that was so bad?
He and his wife divorced. And the wife got custody.
That’s it.
Throughout the movie, it’s made clear that Jane’s anger and her (false) sense of being abandoned are not warranted. These are the thoughts of a child, and Jane is now in her early 30s. We, the audience, see that. She makes some good points. Axel was the parent, even after Jane came of age. Yes. He should have made more of an effort to see her even though she and her mother moved away. Yes.
But she is an adult now and has been for some time. So this thing she’s doing with putting all the blame on him, it doesn’t fly. And through the course of the movie, she realizes that.
Like I said, this is HER story.
As a mild spoiler, Axel takes a bullet for his daughter. Obviously he survives. We, the audience, are not at all surprised that he did this. We know who Axel is, and him being ready to die for his child was not a change or growth in who we know him to be.
But SHE didn’t realize he would do it. This is her growing up, realizing who her father is and realizing she was the one who did the leaving… not him.
In the end, Jane wins everything. Her client walks free. She gets with hot cop Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and she mends ties with her dad.
The dialogue isn’t this clunky, but ultimately, her arc finishes with the realization: “I’m an adult now and I am responsible for myself. More than that, I am Axel Foley’s daughter and am glad of it.”
Axel doesn’t really change. He hears his daughter’s perspective and is surprised by it, though acknowledges her pain. He confronts his old friend about being blind to the corruption in his own department, and he has to adapt his smooth-talking ways to modern times.
But as a person, Axel stays the same man he was at the beginning. And that’s good.
This was his daughter’s story. He was just there to witness it.
Verdict: Quality
If any of that sounded like a complaint, it wasn’t. Axel F is a good movie with several moments that had me laughing out loud, the crazy ass meter maid and the golf course valet being two of them.
There were some moments that beggared belief, such as the 60-year-old Axel disarming the enormous 30-something, but none of it was as preposterous as the gunfight in the first movie. You know, where Rosewood uses a six-shooter against a guy with an Uze… and wins?
It has as its flaws, but nothing to take from the overall quality. It’s a good time, and I recommend it… and there are no boobs to fast forward through this time around.