The first sequels maintained the original’s assertion that police work, when done correctly—that is, with a healthy disregard for stuffy regulations—is a force for good. In 1987’s Beverly Hills Cop II, Foley, Rosewood, and Taggart are forced to deal with a bureaucrat who’s been installed as the chief—a moron who, everyone agrees, doesn’t know anything real police work. (Despite his meddling, the buddy cops still manage to foil a burglary ring and kill all the bad guys.) In 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop III, the villains are a dirty Secret Service agent and the corrupt head of security for an amusement park, but the cops themselves fight doggedly—machine-gunning security guards, etc.—to bring them down.
Thirty years later, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F arrives in an entirely different moment for police officers on screen. These days, it is hard to imagine a studio designing a vehicle for a rising young Black star-in-the-making in which he played a cop. A superhero? Sure. A guy with a badge and a gun? No way. And at a time when the spotlight on police is not highlighting their heroism but revealing their flaws, Axel F becomes the first movie in the series to consider the revolutionary notion that cops lying and covering up their misdeeds might be bad.
Axel F’s opening sequence posits Axel Foley less as an officer of the law and more as a mascot of the city of Detroit, driving around in his crappy car, waving to his pals out on the street, and good-naturedly taking shit from kids. After the de rigueur opening shootout and car chase, Foley’s long-suffering chief, played by Paul Reiser, falls on his sword to save Axel’s career—not because he thinks that Detroit needs Officer Axel Foley, but because he thinks that Axel Foley needs the job. Foley may be a dinosaur of a cop, but he’s got nothing else in his life.
Foley heads back to California because his buddy Rosewood tells him that Foley’s estranged daughter, Jane (Taylour Paige), is in trouble. She’s an attorney trying to clear an accused cop-killer who she believes was framed. Rosewood agrees and has fallen out with the chief, his old partner Taggart, over Rosewood’s claims that a narcotics task force led by Cade Grant (Kevin Bacon) is corrupt.
The movie’s story, by former Los Angeles detective Will Beall, is both convoluted and as simple as can be. Through all the twists and turns, never for a second do we doubt that Jane and Rosewood have it right. From his first appearance on screen, Bacon is hilariously untrustworthy. (“He’s the first police captain I’ve ever seen in $2,000 Gucci shoes,” Foley observes.) With Rosewood and Taggart mostly sidelined due to oldness and unfamousness, the movie gives Cade Grant an opposing force in the BHPD in the form of Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an enlightened, by-the-book detective who’s trying to untangle the murder case—and who’s willing to follow the evidence where it leads.
If the dramatic arc of Beverly Hills Cop was Axel teaching Rosewood and Taggart that it’s OK to lie sometimes when you’re a cop—that you don’t have to do everything by the book—the dramatic arc of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is Axel discovering the nearly unchecked power of a cop who’s willing to lie everything. A crooked cop in a position of power can make lots of ’s lives difficult: the fall guy stuck in prison, accused of a crime he didn’t commit; Jane, dangled out the window by masked men; Foley himself, ambushed on an L.A. street by gunmen sent by Grant.
When Foley asks Grant the freelance thugs he uses for his departmental dirty work, Grant smirks—and reminds Foley of the creative policing in his own history. “You know what I’m talking , Axel,” he says. “You’re no altar boy yourself.” Grant claims that he’s under enormous pressure to solve the murder of one of his task force’s officers, and what will he do to secure the necessary evidence? “I will do whatever it takes,” he says. It takes planting drugs in Bobby Abbott’s car; it takes kidnapping Jane; it takes torturing Billy Rosewood.
It’s not that Axel Foley is unaware of the concept of police misconduct. (While getting arrested by beat officers who order him not to reach for his badge, he cracks, “I been a cop for 30 years. I’ve been Black a whole lot longer. Trust me, I know better.”) It’s that he—like the movie—makes a distinction between a real bad cop and a good bad cop who sometimes breaks every single rule, but for the right reasons. This is a delicate distinction to pull off, and it’s no match for the demands of the old-fashioned action-comedy. By the time Foley and his two partners, Bobby and Billy, lead a wild police chase down L.A. freeways, the movie’s having a good old time. “Never been on this end of a pursuit before,” Abbott mutters. “It’s an acquired taste,” says Rosewood, grinning like a madman. “Has he taken you to a strip club yet?”
In the year 2024, I’m not convinced quite so many viewers are going to be interested in parsing the differences between Axel Foley and Cade Grant. It’s been three decades since the last Beverly Hills Cop movie, long enough for a sea change in the way viewers think police—hell, long enough for the real-life officer who played Axel Foley’s boss to be accused, himself, of being a corrupt cop. I’m sure Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F will be perfectly successful for Netflix, drawing an audience hungry for nostalgia—nostalgia the movie serves up willingly. It’s nostalgic for the era of big movie stars whose personality can carry a whole movie. It’s nostalgic for the big gunfights of the 1980s, our heroes taking out machine-gun-toting bad guys with deadeye aim. Most of all—despite its gestures toward the complicated present—it’s nostalgic for a time when the audience believed there could be such a thing as a good bad cop. I wonder if the audience will believe that now.
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