EDDIE MURPHY RETURNS FOR NETFLIX'S 'BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F'

Title: Beverly Hills Cop: Axl F from 2024 Rating: **

Between a fan-service opening where Axel Foley winds up in a truck chase through Detroit, like the original... only orchestrated with the second movie's song and with him behind the wheel this time... and vignettes with Eddie Murphy doing various imitations to trick people within the comparably soft and gullible Beverly Hills... he's hanging around his idealistic lawyer daughter (Taylour Page), so severely uptight and painfully miscast it's never quite clear if BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F is the pilot for a Netflix series or a stand-alone feature...

Because there's no real character or story-arc to fit within an effective 2-hour mainframe while Murphy, no matter how hard he tries to be funny with those cute little voices, simply cannot play off this new smug sidekick the way he did Judge Reinhold and John Ashton... both seeming thrown in here at the last minute... who were his polar opposites, dead set against before inevitably joining into the original classic's infectiously entertaining revenge-plot misadventure — that should have been left alone in the first place.

Eddie Murphy (and Paul Reiser) in BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXL F

John Ashton in BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXL F

Judge Reinhold in BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXL F

Taylour Page and Joseph Godon-Levitt in BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXL F with Eddie Murphy