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Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F has landed on the streamer today! So the reviews are out in the wild as the audience scores build. So where are we?
Audiences seem to like it more than critics. It has audience scores in the mid to high 80s, while the critics’ reviews hover in the high 60s to low 70s range.
Compare that to the rest of the franchise, that places it comfortably in second place in the franchise overall, behind the original entry. Tony Scott’s second entry sits at sub-50% and the John Landis third entry hits as low as 30% depending on platform and scoring system.
What is interesting is that most of the critics seem to find things to like in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. Here is a sample of their reviews as per Rotten Tomatoes:
“Far better than anticipated (or has any right to be), thanks in large part to Murphy recapturing some of the wisecracking magic that originally made Axel a sensation.”
Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
“Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F isn’t just a great sequel, or an awesome action-comedy, it might just be the most entertaining movie of the year.”
Kristy Puchko, Mashable
“Axel F can’t afford to overplay the fish out of water dynamic from the original (Axel isn’t a stranger to Beverly Hills anymore), but it finds a clever way to tweak the same formula without disrupting it entirely.”
David Ehrlich, IndieWire
“Satisfyingly constructed less like a modern blockbuster and more like a Beverly Hills Cop movie, the film is mostly baseline effective and aggressively average, elevated by Eddie Murphy trying to recapture his prime”
Robert Kojder, Flickering Myth
“In both structure and presentation, Axel F often feels as ‘80s as cocaine and Kevin Bacon—and, wouldn’t you know it, this movie contains scads of both.”
Jarrod Jones, AV Club
“Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is another magic trick that shows it takes the right alchemy to make something flourish, even if it takes years of experiments to determine the right combination.”
Marcus Shorter, Consequence
It is not all sunshine and wisecracks, though, as there is always one misery. Normally they write for Last Movie Outpost, though…
“The shortage of fresh perspective, the absence of excitement and the slavishness with which the filmmakers stick to the original formula in one unimaginative action sequence after another makes the sequel seem past its expiration date.”
David Rooney, THR
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is on the streamer right now.