*½/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Will Beall and Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
directed by Mark Molloy
by Walter Chaw Two things about Beverly Hills Cop IV, or Axel F if you’re nasty: 1) it’s so exhausted, there’s plenty of time to think through what these films are really about, and 2) there’s an existential horror attached to watching ageing idols trapped in endless iterations of themselves always, of course, but especially when they’re asked to continue to do the things they are no longer capable of doing. I’m thinking in particular of how sad it is to feel patronizing towards Harrison Ford after spending a lifetime in awe of him as an Übermensch in galaxies far, far away, booby-trapped tombs about to be robbed, or the Japanese-colonized Los Angeles of an eternal tomorrow just a few days away. Seeing him attempt to be young Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny is…pathetic? I’m not saying I could do better; I’m saying in my glorious prime, I could never have given performances as perfectly physical as Ford did, and today, still 30 years his junior, I can’t get off my sofa without noises erupting from every part of my body. I’m saying it would be like if Michael Jordan suited up again to attempt one more NBA season at the age of 61. It’s like breaking up a brawl at the old-folks’ home. They say the toothless get ruthless, though in my experience, they get brittle and out of breath. The Eddie Murphy of Martin Brest’s Beverly Hills Cop was lithe and dangerous, echoing the Eddie of 48Hrs., who could fight a hulking Nick Nolte to a draw. Of the dozens, maybe hundreds of times I watched Beverly Hills Cop, the image of Murphy in it that persists for me is of him swinging around in the webbing on the back of a trailer during the opening sequence. He’s quick, strong, dangerous. Now? Now Eddie’s 63 and in amazing shape–but amazing shape for a man who is 63.
What I’ve enjoyed about the recent Bad Boys films is how they don’t pretend their stars aren’t pushing 60. There are subplots about heart attacks and grandchildren and gags about being unable to keep up in foot races. They’re not necessarily about mortality, but in recognizing the characters’ mileage…they kind of are. What makes Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky and Rambo sagas uniquely touching is how they deal, eventually, with the choices these violent men have made over the years and the awful physical and mental toll it’s taken on them and their families. When Stallone reprised his palooka for Creed, he invested him with fear, cancer, fatalism–he didn’t put him back in the ring as a CGI puppet with a de-aged digital mask and pretend that a 75-year-old man moves the same way he did at 31. Is it ageist to note that people change as they grow older? Maybe it’s the very definition of it. I will say that I was struck by how, in both Axel F and The Dial of Destiny, there are chases staged in, respectively, a golf cart and a TukTuk, which, to me, feels more ageist than observing that neither Murphy nor Ford is 40 years younger. It doesn’t have to be pathetic. You can dye your hair black and wear skintight Under Armour workout gear well into your nineties if you want, go with God, but it wouldn’t matter as much if you did, because your prime years weren’t documented and disseminated in the most-consumed popular culture in all of human history.
Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is still a streetwise street cop in a Detroit portrayed as a Conservative’s nightmare metropolis, beset by infrastructural shortfalls and criminal infestation from which sprang Foley, who, in every one of these films, expertly commits crimes he learned as a child growing up there. The subtext is text: Detroit is where criminals learn to be criminals. Typically, they’re Black. The redemptive story of the Beverly Hills Cop premise is the same as Demolition Man‘s: a man of felonious violence is introduced into a “classy” environment so he can save it from its own corruption using “low” tactics unfamiliar to its pampered residents. The alien will comment on the excesses that have softened this social strata and made them vulnerable to exploitation–and then he will return to his harsh planet so as not to continue disturbing the society he has fixed, where he will always be seen as an interloper. It’s not much different in formula from the “secret Green Beret” gag or a certain western where an Indian hunter searches for his abducted niece and maybe kills her or maybe returns her but definitely does not get invited to sit beside the fire once it’s all over. When you introduce race into the mix–as Eddie Murphy inevitably does, not only through the fact of him but also through his shtick (“I’ve been Black longer than I’ve been a cop, I know the drill,” he says after he’s told not to reach for his ID (another thing he constantly has to do in these films))–you take on the responsibility to deal with what it is about these films that remains attractive to a mainstream audience. Does it have anything to do with what Spike Lee dubbed “super-duper magical Negro” syndrome? To some extent, Murphy’s incandescent stardom distracted from this over the first three films. Here? Maybe it’s just me getting old.
Axel learns that his lawyer daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), presumably the offspring of a now-defunct marriage to dead-eyed Janice (Theresa Randle from Beverly Hills Cop III), is the target of–and this is only a spoiler if you’ve never seen a movie before–corrupt Captain Grant (Kevin Bacon), who is so oily I expected Axel to wisecrack about it after meeting him rather than shake his hand solemnly and respect his authority. Axel’s extraordinary inability to read this Armani-clad Hannibal Lecter isn’t a product of his skills blunting in his dotage–it’s an expedience, one of many in a straight-line procedural lampoon intermittently interrupted, as usual, by Murphy’s improvisational bits: his accents and impersonations and his patented fast-talking, quick-witted hustler routine. (Axel’s homophobia and misogyny have been shelved for 2024.) These films are essentially Hope/Crosby “Road” movies with ultraviolence, featuring the same sexual entendre and the same supporting cast rolling their eyes indulgently whenever Axel hijacks the microphone, disrupting another space in which he’s clearly the alien to honk laughter at the pretensions of the beautiful people–who are so inauthentic compared to the hardened souls of his Motor City–and Black youth who invite Detective Foley to go fuck himself when he teases them about conducting their drug deals in public instead of pushing tiny dogs in baby carriages while wearing stilettos on Rodeo Drive. The joke is that white people walk like this while Black people walk like this.
Many of the surviving cast members from the previous films have glorified cameos, including Paul Reiser, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton (absent in the second sequel but returning here to make a lot of unfunny jokes about a wife he hates), and of course Bronson Pinchot. You know who I’m missing? Lisa Eilbacher’s Jenny Summers, from the first Beverly Hills Cop–the only film of the four that feels like it has any stakes, what with its brutal setup featuring the cold-blooded execution of Axel’s childhood buddy, Mikey (James Russo). Their mutual pal Jenny has moved to Beverly Hills, and she and Axel have a reunion that would have led to a relationship, I think, had Jenny been Black in 1984. Eddie Murphy, remember, used to be pretty scary to the white establishment. Beverly Hills Cop neutered the threat he represents: All of his gifts are employed for the restoration of white order. He doesn’t challenge reproductive access to white women, he doesn’t hang around taking jobs from his inferior white brothers. He’s Shane. He leaves when his work is done. He and Jenny are united by class as opposed to race, a strong statement in itself about class divisions–about how money is the great equalizer or, as the case may be, divider. Jenny is comfortably situated in Beverly Hills because class-climbing is a pastime easier for beautiful white women. Imagine her as the mother of Jane in Axel F, how she has looked to better Jane’s life by raising her outside of the cartoonishly chaotic environment that is this world’s Detroit Rock City. Now we can talk about racial resentments and stereotypes, about Jane being taught to code-switch and the complexities of her relationship with BHPD stud Abbott (Joseph-Gordon Levitt). Alas, forty years have passed, but the series hasn’t gotten any braver. Just older. A lot older. Haven’t we all.
