Is Eddie Murphy Still Funny? 'Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F' Brings His Career Full Circle

#279: "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F," "MaXXXine," "Daddio," "Twister," "The Front Runner"

Edition 279:

Hey movie lovers!

This week: Eddie Murphy is back at the center of the culture, by playing the character that made him a star 40 years ago. Plus my thoughts on MaXXXine and Daddio, and two very topical streaming suggestions. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” are you not entertained! A Gladiator sequel is coming this fall.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

Anyone who was anyone in Hollywood in late 1980s and early 90s better be calling up their agents, because there’s money to be made. It’s the year of the legacy sequel, and the old geezers from Ghostbusters, Mean Girls, Bad Boys, and all the rockers on the soundtrack of The Fall Guy are cashing in on popular stuff they made decades ago.

Enter Eddie Murphy, who already tried and failed this once with Coming 2 America in 2021, but takes a much bigger swing this time in reviving his most iconic silver screen roll as the infamous Detroit cop soaking up the SoCal, Axel Foley.

Murphy’s comedic special sauce when he debuted as Foley in 1984 — 40 (FORTY) years ago, it bears mentioning — was his high energy charisma. In this and really all of his roles, and his stand-up comedy (and I mean this in the most respectful way possible), Murphy entertained people like a clown. He stood directly in front of you, flashed that toothy smile and erupted like an explosion of jokes and voices and movement until you couldn’t help but laugh.

That’s a big reason why, in my estimation, he spent much of his movie career in the 2000s making kids movies, where this persona was most effective.

Now at age 63 he is understandably a different kind of guy. He’s older, richer and doughy-er, and doesn’t feel the same urgency to make sure every single person in a room are overwhelmed by his presence.

I know this is a hot take, but he’s got me wondering if the reason why his movies from the past five years have been either serious movies where he’s not doing jokes (Dolemite Is My Name, You People) or failed comedies (Coming 2 America, Candy Cane Lane) is because Eddie Murphy is no longer funny.

Watching Axel F is quite similar to going to a rock concert for any of those legacy Boomer acts — Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Billy Joel and so on. They are stirring the echoes of former glory and giving recognizable but noticeably diminished renditions of their greatest hits. That’s what happens here, bringing back all of the characters and most of the same jokes as 40 years ago and thankfully managing to clear the bar of embarrassment and/or desperation.

Thankfully, this isn’t a franchise that was loaded down with lore or tropes that needed to be covered. Axel Foley’s shticks are basically just elaborate lies and commandeering random vehicles for chase sequences, which he does here with 1) a trash truck, 2) a police golf cart and 3) a police helicopter.

Those make for exciting if heavily CGI’d sequences, and in general the action and adventure elements heavily outweighed any attempts at comedy.

Perhaps that’s because this franchise was once had a young, cool, zeitgeisty edge to it and now is populated with Murphy (63), Judge Reinhold (67), John Ashton (76), and Paul Reiser (68). The young blood brought on board for this movie includes Kevin Bacon (66) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (43), not exactly fresh faces (with the exception of Taylour Paige, who at 33 plays Murphy’s daughter).

The plot is pretty garden variety action movie nonsense. There’s a macguffin, like always (get the SD card!!), which sends our characters on a wild goose chase through a requisite number of action sequences before they end up in a stand-off inside a Beverly Hills mansion.

Overall, I think the movie “pulled it off” with competence and nothing more. It’s trading on credit accrued a long time ago with the first two movies (that third movie definitely counts as a withdrawal), but doesn’t tarnish its reputation any further. In the wake of the Bad Boys travesty, that’s saying a lot.

Still, fundamentally, I have a problem with a system that has gotten so risk-averse that it chooses 63-year-old stars over 23 year olds every single time. Stop for a second and think about how inconceivable it would be for a movie in 2024 to have a cast where five of the top eight cast members are 28 years old or younger, like the first Beverly Hills Cop had.

Nowadays that’s the average cast age for a streaming show set in high school! And since this movie is on Netflix, you can’t even make the butts in seats argument.

With all these legacy sequels, our current pop culture is eating its own tail. Nothing feels new, nothing feels fresh, nothing feels cutting edge. No one is defining the current generation, let alone pushing us forward into a new one.

That’s what I want, and I think what a lot of others want. But you have to make a deal with me okay? When one of those kinds of movies comes out and I give it my support in this newsletter, you have to promise you’ll go out and buy a ticket to see it. Deal??

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Something New

MaXXXine (Theaters): I wrote about my experience at the premiere for this movie, but removed from the hype cycle of that environment I’ve been able to straighten out my thoughts a bit.

I really feel like the first half to two-thirds of this movie rocks and rolls with an energy that pretty much every other 2024 release should be jealous of — it’s pulpy, bloody, and packed with references to iconic films and 1980s pop culture — but the movie does start to wobble in the home stretch and I find the ending to be pretty unsatisfying. That said, it really has to be considered a top five release of the year so far, and I don’t think you need to have seen either of the first two entries in the series to follow and enjoy it.

Daddio (Theaters): About 30 minutes into this movie, it dawns on you that the entire 1hr40min runtime is going to take place inside this New York City cab, a claustrophobia and forced intimacy that serves its narrative of unlikely connection between driver and rider. Still, it feels less like a “real” movie than a festival entry, an experiment of a feature used as proof of concept for writers/directors/actors to prove what they can do so they can secure opportunities to make something more conventional next time out.

That may be true for writer/director Christy Hall here, but the two actors aren’t exactly new kids on the block. Sean Penn stars as the cabbie and reminds us why, despite his bonkers off-screen behavior, he’s consistently been considered one of the best actors of his generation. He’s nuanced, layered, and plays a wide spectrum of emotional notes brilliantly while commanding the attention of the camera, the viewer and his scene partner, Dakota Johnson. At this point, we have more than enough evidence to conclude that Johnson is a charismatic but limited actor. As far as I can tell, she pretty much only has two modes — flirty and distressed — and through she’s famous enough to hold the screen with Penn I can’t help but wonder what this movie might’ve looked like with a more dynamic actor.

It’s going to be a hard movie to recommend unless you have a lot of patience and high level of empathy, as the movie revolves entirely around the peeling back of Johnson’s character’s life like an onion, with very little in the way of universal commonality. It’s an acting showcase for the two leads, who are practically performing dialogue and monologues in a black box theater here with a single rearview mirror for a prop. But I doubt anyone will walk away strongly affected by its contents.

Something Old

Twister (1996, Max): In case you missed it, Tom Cruise attended the premiere for next week’s Twisters and coronated Glen Powell as his spiritual successor (if I was Miles Teller and saw that photo I’d be fuming). I can’t wait, but until that next stop on the Powell Movie Star Ascendence Tour, I went back and watched the original disaster mid-90s movie. Lest we think this is some sacrosanct text from the glory days, this movie happened only because famous Hollywood visual effects company ILM created a demo clip of a CGI tornado sucking up a truck, and studios basically said let’s build a story around that.

It plays out a bit like the tail wagging the dog, with five different tornado sequences dotting the 1hr53min runtime (gotta love the 90s), and the star of the movie is definitely the effects, which blew people’s minds when the movie was released. The spectacle generated nearly $500 million worldwide (nearly a billion in today’s dollars).

What’s great about this movie and pretty much all the blockbusters of the time is that the plot doesn’t need to be a whole lot more complicated than that. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt have a little romantic angle, and an all-star cast of character actors dot the storm-chasing crews including Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Cary Elwes and the filmmaker Todd Field. But it’s basically straightforward action adventure with clever dialogue and jokes breaking up really earnest and intense action sequences. And hey, I’m never going to complain about a movie set in my home state of Oklahoma!!

Something to Stream

The Front Runner (Starz, Hulu): I fell hard for this movie back in 2018, calling it basically “the best episode of ‘The West Wing’ ever.” And since I’ve been caught up in the political frenzy like everyone else since the debate, I was thinking back on politics movies I’d like to rewatch. It centers on the presidential campaign of 1988, when promising candidate Gary Hart, played excellently by Hugh Jackman, got shamed out of the race for having an extramarital affair (the horror!! in 2024 we yawn about that sort of thing).

It’s really a true ensemble movie, with J.K. Simmons in here as a campaign manager and comedian Bill Burr as a reporter among others playing roles in what is often controlled chaos of five or 10 people speaking at once and the camera flying around. I’m really hoping that a revisit of this movie confirms my initial feelings about it as one of the best political movies of the past decade.

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Trailer Watch: Gladiator II

It’s pretty easy to see the downstream effects of Top Gun: Maverick in this week’s big trailer releases: Brad Pitt in F1 and Denzel Washington in Gladiator II. You’ve got someone super famous playing their own greatest hits in slightly new settings. Pitt is basically Moneyball-ing in a race car, Washington is basically Training Day-ing in Ancient Rome.

Paramount, and its new owners, really really needs this movie to be a fat hit, throwing all of its resources behind director Ridley Scott to produce something that looks at least technically very impressive. The story is a bit confusing — I’m not really buying the whole Paul Mescal as Maximus’ son thing — and Ridley fooled us just last year with a great trailer for Napoleon, but I’m choosing to bite once again and get really excited for this to be good.