Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

BHC is pre-woke

Had to rewatch them all. If there’s anything woke in the franchise, I completely missed it.

This is typical of modern late to the party sequels thought it's probably a little better than most. It manages to maintain the feel and atmosphere of the originals for the most part. All the usual tropes, cliché story, all the legacy characters show up for limited screen time looking old and just sad. Your enjoyment of this movie will probably heavily depend on your nostalgia of the originals, if you've never seen them then this will probably not be very good either. The director does a good job of capturing the feel of the franchise but it's painfully obvious he's in way over his head. It's another instance of an unproven nobody being handed a job he's unqualified for. This guy's sole directing credits are a handful of less shorts less than 5 minutes long then gets to direct a 150 million dollar action franchise movie? How does this happen?
Then there is the usual woke problems as well. Axel has a scene at the beginning that appears to make fun of the woke white liberal racists then 10 minutes later plays the police victimize blacks card. There are 2 ridiculous DEI female officers that are clearly there for a reason. There are multiple modern woke comments and mentalities scattered throughout. Axel's daughter hijacks a good portion of the movie and the constant whining about her dysfunctional family gets old fast and serves to just pad out film time. Her acting is not very good, she's not likable and she gets more annoying as the movie goes on. She is a defense attorney that takes on a case for an innocent Spanish male that she just believes immediately for no real reason and with zero evidence at that point. She is involved with a white male so we can check the mixed race box. There are multiple characters that appear to be gay or at least beta's based on speech and mannerisms. There is a very flamboyant obviously gay Spanish drug dealer in a weird gay bar with half naked
men walking around. At no point is any of this stuff the focus of the movie or is it preached about but it is present and it is there for a reason. This may be worth a watch depending on your tolerance for woke.