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Bring Back the Freeze-Frame Ending!
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F spends its final moments on a thrilling cinematic trope of the ’80s, one that I would argue is due for a comeback.
Considering the bottomless trough of legacy-sequel slop that Hollywood has so reliably provided us with over the last decade, it came as a pleasant surprise that the long-gestating Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F turned out to be a pretty slickly made summer movie — one that mostly knows when to tweak the formula and when to coast on pure nostalgia. But for the most part, the nostalgia bait works — it’s still fun to see Axel Foley improvise characters on the fly to talk his way into rooms he shouldn’t be in, and Eddie Murphy’s mile-wide grin lights up the screen even when it’s detached from the honking laugh that you ungrateful losers mocked him for in the ’80s. To its credit, the movie also at least tries to engage with the modern era, taking a more critical view of police by making its villain (Kevin Bacon) a crooked cop who wishes the public didn’t care so much about “what we say and what we do.” Despite those updates, though, Axel F sticks to the franchise’s blueprint where it matters most, using its final moments to employ one of the most thrilling cinematic tropes of the ’80s, and one that I would argue is due for a comeback: the freeze-frame ending.
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