Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024)

Forty years of Axel Foley has produced a fourth installment that arrives not in theaters but on Netflix, a distinction the film itself seems content to ignore. Mark Molloy, making his feature debut, keeps the engine idling: Detroit chaos, Beverly Hills condescension, a synth theme that does the emotional labor. Eddie Murphy remains a magnetic presence, and the screenplay hands him a daughter, Jane, a defense attorney played by Taylour Paige, whose estrangement supplies the film's only genuine stakes. The father-daughter reconciliation is handled with the efficiency of a man folding a fitted sheet. It works, mostly, because Murphy can sell sincerity when the script bothers to ask.

The film's social consciousness is inherited furniture. A Black detective walks into a wealthy white police department and nobody remarks upon it, because the franchise settled that question in 1984 and has felt no need to revisit the paperwork. Taylour Paige's attorney is competent and central, though the film never pauses to make an argument about gender. Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. The villains are a corrupt captain and a drug cartel, which is to say the film has no interest in indicting wealth itself, only in indicting a few bad men who happen to own a mansion.

The remainder is a legacy sequel that preaches nothing. It coasts on banter, callback, and the reliable sight of Judge Reinhold looking mildly bewildered. No sermons are delivered. No lessons are drawn. The film asks only that we remember 1984 fondly and forgive the intervening decades. That is a modest request, and the film meets it with modest success.