SPOILER WARNING: This story mentions major spoilers for “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” now streaming on Netflix.
Axel Foley is back in Beverly Hills, and so is Eddie Murphy.
“Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” director Mark Molloy set out to make a film with the same feeling and tone as the 1984 classic “Beverly Hills Cop” and its 1987 sequel, “Beverly Hills Cop 2.” He calls the latest film in the franchise “my love letter to the first two films.”
Molloy recruited Jahmin Assa, the film’s production designer, to pay tribute to those earlier chapters in numerous ways. Assa’s goal was to create something that made “Los Angeles feel timeless and as fresh as it did in the 1980s,” and that included shutting down city streets in Detroit and Los Angeles to finding the perfect location to execute a 1980s-style mansion shootout for the film’s third act, and crash landing a helicopter in Beverly Hills.
Popular on Variety
Related Stories
The Heat Is On
The film opens with Foley back in Detroit sitting behind the wheel of his 1970s blue Chevy Nova as Glenn Frey’s “The Heat is On” plays.
That callback to the original started on the page in the script by co-writers Will Beall, Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten. Frey’s song opened the original film, and by bringing it back here, Molloy said, “I wanted the audience and fans of the franchise to think, ‘This is exactly where I want to be.'”
In the big action sequence that follows, Axel drives a snowplow through the streets of Detroit in pursuit of the criminals he’s chasing. It echoes the first sequence in the original film, where Axel attempts to stop a stolen truck filled with illegal cargo while police cars chase the truck — and him — through Detroit.
The idea was to show that Axel was still the cop audiences remembered, and nothing about him had really changed. “I wanted to show his cavalier ways — that how he goes about things doesn’t really work in the modern world anymore,” Molloy explained.
It also gives new audiences a chance to understand the attitude and perspective that Axel brings to life, much less to serving as a policeman.
Assa indicated that the production took over the streets of Detroit. “We scouted and shot in Downtown Detroit. We made a grid where we could cause as much destruction and mayhem as Axel does in that mischievous and great way.” He added, “We tried to hit many of Detroit’s iconic sort of downtown landmarks.” As the chase comes to an end, Axel crashes the snowplow through a pile of garbage.
Axel returns to Beverly Hills
Thirty years after audiences last saw him, Axel returns to Beverly Hills after learning that his estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), a criminal defense attorney, is working on a case that lands her in grave danger. Reluctantly, Jane teams up with her father, and the two of them team up with Detective Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and old friends John Taggart (John Ashton) and Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold). Together, they uncover a vast criminal conspiracy linked to Jane’s case.
In both of the first two films — notably, the only ones that Molloy and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have actually seen — Axel’s arrival in Beverly Hills begins his fish-out-of-water journey. To highlight the dramatic contrast between Detroit’s snow-covered neighborhoods and Beverly Hills’ sun-dappled paradise, Molloy opted to drop Axel onto one of the latter’s weathiest streets, Rodeo Drive, and then plunge him into another chaotic chase sequence. With everything done in-camera, Molloy ended up shutting down Rodeo for seven days, though he could only work in the morning since its luxury retailers would have to open up by lunchtime.
Molloy also shut down Santa Monica Blvd. when the stolen helicopter crash lands on a golf course near City Hall. “When it actually crashes, that was real,” Assa revealed.
While the City Hall and exteriors were shot on location, the Beverly Hills police station was recreated on a stage. Assa notes Beverly Hills is small, so the set needed to feel like a small-town police station with new technology, but not be overwhelmed by it. Assa said, “We used a lot of tans and blues of that same era so it had that vintage feel, but also wanted it to feel a bit contemporary.” He intentionally built Taggart’s office with the idea that the chief could see the entire bullpen and everything that was going on. “You could always feel him in the background,” said Assa.
The Mansion
Molloy wanted to find a way of nodding to the Maitland Mansion shootout that occurs during the climax of the first film. He also felt a nostalgia for “a good old school shootout with bullets flying everywhere and stunts.” Consequently as the film enters its third act, Molloy brings Taggart and Rosewood together where they’re caught in a shootout, appropriately in a mansion. “To be able to play with that. It’s familiar, but it’s an evolution of what we know,” Molloy explained.
Assa looked at over 200 mansions in and around Los Angeles. He wanted an classic mansion look with columns, a rotunda, high ceilings and lots of places for characters to hide. He eventually found one on Benedict Canyon Drive. “We looked at every version you could ever imagine,” Assa said.
However, Assa still had to recreate the front of the mansion and its foyer on a soundstage for the moment the truck came crashing through the front. Assa and his team recreated all the rubble at the actual mansion to match it with the rubble from the soundstage, but Taggart and Rosewood’s scene and the shootout that ensues were done in the real mansion.
Assa found recreating the foyer to be the most challenging. His build needed to match the real mansion. “I had all the columns built. I wanted them not to feel fake, but also they needed to be safe enough for the crew — so when the truck came through, it could cause damage and mayhem and keep us safe too.”
The Biltmore Hotel
During prep, the team had discussed the idea and wanted to return to the Beverly Hills hotel Axel stayed at in the original. While watching the 1984 film, Assa noted it was actually the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, not a hotel in Beverly Hills.
Assa and his team trimmed some of the trees in front of the hotel and changed all the signage on the hotel’s exterior.
For the interior, Assa didn’t use the hotel’s actual front desk, rather they used a downstairs area — in fact, the bar where the original was photographed. “We built the front desk and hotel check in that area,” said Assa.
Molloy loved the idea that Axel returns there, this time with his daughter. “We liked this idea of feeling the years had passed. You see young Axel come in with a big smile and full of energy. Whereas now he comes in and has just been through an emotional moment with his daughter. And we just get a sense that things have changed. The callback is the same but the emotional outtake is pretty different,” Molloy said.
Axel Foley in the back of the police car
Assa used sedans rather than SUVs for the police cars.
For Molloy, Axel Foley sitting in the back of the car whose passengers were supposed to be monitoring him was an “iconic image.” Yet it was something that hadn’t been in the “Axel F” script, so he fought to include it. “I just remember it so clearly,” he remembered. “Almost like, as a fan, I want to be back in that car with the three of them.”
“Are they any wiser? We don’t know,” Molloy said. “But it’s just such a thing, and as a fan, I’m exactly where I want to be.”