Beverly Hills Cop - Axel F

A Piece Of The Axel

Beverly Hills Cop - Axel F
aka Beverly Hills Cop 4
Directed by Mark Molloy
USA 2024

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Axel Foley is back... finally. Played once more by Eddie Murphy, this movie completely ignores the pilot film for the proposed TV show and puts Axel F back on the streets as opposed to running the station, his TV son now swapped out for an estranged movie daughter (which, aside from the huge continuity errors made by conflicting events in the pilot movie, also screws up the third movie, where he had no children but the daughter is therefore a couple of years older than she should be here... if audiences can spot these things, why can’t the actual writers?).

The plot set up on Beverly Hills Cop - Axel F is simple but good fun. Billy Rosewood, played again by Judge Reinhold, is out on a case which will clear a suspect in jail from being a cop killer. But he gets too close and is kidnapped and held by ‘the bad guys’ to try and get the evidence they know he has on them. But not before he has engaged Axel’s daughter, played by Taylour Paige, to clear the suspect of the charges (she is a lawyer) and also not before he calls in Axel, because he’s worried for her safety after she is almost killed and threatened to drop the case (something he knows she won’t do).

Other series regulars include Paul Reiser who has now taken over from the former chief back in Axel’s regular stomping ground, John Ashton as Taggart, Billy’s ex-partner who is now running the precinct in Beverly Hills and a, not exactly surprising but welcome return of Serge in a scene, played once again by Bronson Pinchot. Also new to the cast, asides from Taylour Paige, is Joseph Gordon-Levitt as another cop in Billy’s precinct (who also has a dating history with Axel’s daughter), Luis Guzmán  as a criminal kingpin and Kevin Bacon as an FBI man who, you just know is going to turn out to be the villain of the piece as soon as his first scene hits.

And it’s a great little movie, it has to be said... harkening right back to the origins of the character (as released, not the Stallone version) with Eddie Murphy playing it relatively straight (asides from his usual wise cracks) and with an equal emphasis on action, rather than just comedy (just like in the original, when you actually cared about the characters somewhat.... which follows through here). It might seem a little slow at times to a younger audience expecting just endless carnage but it’s a nice little homage to the original and it pretty much hits all the right beats. You also get a snow plough chase and a helicopter chase thrown in for good measure.

One of the nicest things for me, though, was the music. Not just the brilliant score but also the use of songs. At least three of the songs were used front and centre in the first movie and, here, they’re used in a similar fashion. In fact, the first song of the movie is Glenn Frey doing The Heat Is On and it really brought back memories of me sitting in a cinema in the early 1980s with a dear, now departed friend. 

Similarly, the underscore is absolutely spot on. This time around they’ve got a modern composer who I quite like, Lorne Balfe... but he uses all of the old Harold Faltermeyer themes (such as Axel F, Shoot Out etc) and he orchestrates the synthesiser work, to my ears at least, exactly as Faltermeyer did in the first two movies. It’s absolutely brilliant.

So, yeah, a short review and my only problem with the movie is that it was funded by an evil ‘cinema killing’ company who have hogged it for their own channel rather than get the cinema release it deserves. I’m guessing this means I won’t be able to buy a copy on Blu Ray either, which is a problem for me (not an ‘official’ Blu Ray but there may be other options). At least a CD soundtrack is coming though, I believe (although I’d also like a CD for the third movie too, please). So, yeah, I’d almost rather the movie never got made than be financed and distributed by said evil corporation but, as it is, Beverly Hills Cop - Axel F is an absolutely wonderful and entertaining sequel and doesn’t let the original movies down in any way. Worth checking out, if only to remind yourself that Eddie Murphy can do some pretty good acting when he puts his mind to it. Just waiting to see if they do a Yet Another 48 Hours next.

Poker Face

Long In
The Truth

Poker Face
Created by Rian Johnson
Season 1 10 episodes
January - March 2023
Blu Ray Zone A

I bought new mystery TV show Poker Face for my mum for Christmas because it was being heavily compared to Columbo on the internet, a show that she had loved watching in the 1970s. I wish I’d have held out a few weeks longer because, when I grabbed it, it wasn’t available in the UK so I just assumed it wouldn’t be getting a release in this country. So it cost me more to import a copy than I needed to have paid, if the company putting it out over here had only got its act together and given it a simultaneous release.

Okay, so it’s created by Rian Johnson, who made a couple of films I really liked called Brick and Looper (plus one of the worst Star Wars movies ever... plus the Knives Out movies which, yeah, were okayish I suppose). He’s written and directed a few of the episodes and the lead actress who plays Charlie Cale (aka Poker Face), Natasha Lyonne,  also directed one of the better episodes of the show.

So, I’m not sure my mum could quite get into the swing of them, to be honest, but my dad and I really enjoyed it and, yeah, there are a couple of superficial resemblances to Columbo. The first being that Lyonne does resemble Peter Falk’s detective in her accent and some of her mannerisms (which a lot of people have pointed out to me). Secondly, the structure of the show is not, mostly, a whodunnit every week. Like Columbo, it starts off with the audience usually in full knowledge of the murder and perpetrator(s) in a five or ten minute sequence without Charlie Cale in it at all (my mum could never get the hang of this and kept asking if the woman from the last show was going to be in it). We then flashback to before the murder and find how Charlie has been inserted into that story from before the events we saw... and then we catch up to those events about half way through, as Charlie solves the case.

So here’s the thing... Charlie has a... let’s call it what it is, a super power. She can tell when anyone is telling her a lie. This gets her into trouble because a casino boss (Ron Perlman) bans her from gambling and has her working at a waitress in his casino instead (which she loves). However, when the boss’ son (Adrien Brody) takes over the casino, he involves Charlie in a scheme to get rich quick in a huge gambling game for him. But, he and his right hand heavy (series regular Benjamin Brat) murder Charlie’s best friend... something she figures out right before their end game and which, eventually, leads to chaos and death for the new casino management. From that point at the end of the first episode, Charlie is off the grid and on the run from Perlman’s character for the rest of season one.

So the format is, she’ll stop in a new town each week, get a temporary job and, pretty much every time, get involved with a murder which she’ll try and solve without the police, often bringing justice in her own, unique way. And most of the episodes have celebrity guest spots too... with actors such as Clea DuVall, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Chloë Sevigny, Ellen Barkin, Luis Guzmán and Nick Nolte all getting involved in the ‘murder of the week’. So there’s a star studded aspect to the show as well.

And it’s pretty well done, the format even allowing for a few twists and turns along the way, as not all the information is always revealed at the episode’s opening and some things become apparent later on which, sometimes, change the identity of the known villain of the episode half way through.

Added to this we have a conclusion to Charlie’s story arc in the final episode of season one, only for it to kind of get soft-rebooted for season two. So, when the casino boss finally catches up with her through his right arm, Benjamin Bratt, the capper of that initial meeting early on in the episode is a) not what you think it would be and b) not telegraphed either. In fact, there’s even a little successful misdirection involved on the part of the writer before the show comes back full circle, with Charlie now being similarly hunted by an even greater threat. I actually thought it was kind of a shame that they decided to soft boot it in that way but I can certainly see why that temptation was there on the part of the show’s producers. They want to keep Charlie hopping from place to place and this is their way of doing that.

One minor thing I didn’t like was the fact that, from episode eight onwards, they gave the main character a facial twitch every time she hears a lie. I guess it’s a nice visual shorthand but, it feels a little clunky and we were doing fine without that for the preceding seven episodes, I thought.

Even so, I really enjoyed the show and, I think I’ll grab the second series of Poker Face too, once it’s aired and played on TV and gets properly released on Blu Ray (otherwise they’ve lost me as an audience, frankly). Definitely worth a watch if you like a large slice of humour with your murder investigations, for sure.

Sin City - A Dame To Kill For

Miller’s Kiss

Sin City - A Dame To Kill For
2014 USA
Directed by Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller
UK Cinema release print.

Warning: One slight spoiler to kill for here... although if you’ve not read the original comic then you may not even realise there was a twist reveal in this movie at all.

Okay, so I’ve not been to Frightfest much since it first started to be “a thing”.. I think I’ve been maybe four or five times only and two of those were for UK premieres of Dario Argento movies The Card Player and Giallo. The other one that sticks in my mind was back in 2005 and it was the first and last time, to date, I’d ever booked a ticket for a “surprise movie” at any festival. I hate the uncertainty of those kinds of screenings and on that one time I took a gamble that the surprise movie would be some kind of UK premiere of Sin City and... I’m happy to say I was right. It blew me away too. Sin City was a great movie and a faithful adaptation of Frank Miller’s original source material. A film I can watch over and over again throughout my life without getting bored.

I was kinda worried about the new film for many reasons, one of which is the fact that it’s now nine years since the last one and audiences seem to have short memories these days. I was also aware that some of the original cast had died, far too young (Michael Clarke Duncan, Brittany Murphy), and that it would be a shame having to see their characters played by different people. As it happens, that wasn’t as distracting as the one character I wasn’t’ that worried about having a change of actor for... basically because the original Frank Miller comic book it’s based on kinda dictated it. However, the way the “reveal” in the comic book is dealt with here is one of the very few false notes in an otherwise perfect second helping of the beautiful union between the semiotics of comics and movies that is the Sin City franchise.

Yeah, that’s right. Near perfect. I know this has done really badly at the box office already and I’ve astonishingly seen some bad word of mouth tweets on the film by people whose verdict on all things cinema I would normally trust. I really don’t know why this incredible wave of negativity is happening with this film though because, frankly, I had a blast with it.

It’s been said that the language of cinema and the language of comics are very similar. Both deal with the telling of events and incidents in a fashion perceived as linear, with comics using a series of static panels to do the same thing as films... but personally I think that’s a little too cut and dried. After all, what is film other than a series of static images projected at a rate the human eye can perceive as motion? It’s not a great leap from 24 frames a second to 24 panels a second. I think, for me, the rich visual language of comic books, much like the edgy subject matter they can sometimes tackle head on in a way that a commercially conscientious movie cannot, is far superior to the visual styles used in the majority of movies. You think it’s a case of film being like a comic book but actually it’s more a case of comics being visually closely allied to film... and then pushing that collision into other realms which aren’t necessarily the most expressive or appropriate ways to explore the territory they are trying to understand. Ang Lee’s Hulk movie, for example, is a perfect example of a film trying to be more like a comic book in the way that it encompasses a very similar visual language by using the background organisation of the printed comic page being split into panels and then finding a way to, sometimes very cleverly, use those panels to make a narrative which can speed up or slow down your perception of time as required by the confines of the story.

The first Sin City film followed the stark black and white colouring shot through with odd, bright colours highlighting various characters and objects which was used in some of the issues... although I seem to remember the original A Dame To Kill didn’t actually use any colour in it (if memory serves me correctly). Like the first movie, though, it serves to enhance the overall look of the Sin City branding and it’s certainly used very effectively. This film looks every bit as spectacular as the first movie in the franchise and, once again, Rodriguez and Miller have done a fine job of adapting this masterwork, even going as far as to graphically bring many of the comic book panels to life as almost “animated moments” like they were in the first movie.

I have very few complaints but one of them would be Jessica Alba in the role of Nancy. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an incredible actress and does a fine job here but... again, in Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, we see her obviously reluctant to take her clothes off like the character does in the comics and this really does kinda blow the credibility of Nancy on film in terms of someone who is an infamous stripper dancing in one of the sleaziest bars in Sin City. I love Jessica Alba as much as the next warm blooded guy or gal but, for such a crucial part, there really needs to be a lack of clothes, I feel.

My other complaint would be the character of Dwight, as played by Josh Brolin, who does very well in the part and bounces off of Mickey Rourke’s exquisite return engagement as “the tough guy’s tough guy” Marv in just the way you need him too. I wasn’t too worried about Brolin replacing the already excellent Clive Owen in the role of Dwight for the simple reason that, if you’ve ever read A Dame To Kill For, you’ll know that they would have had to have used a different actor for the majority of it. The story is set before most of the events that took place in the previous movie and so you get to find out why Manute has a bright yellow eyepiece and why Marv, and Goldie and her sister, of course, are all alive in this one. In the original A Dame To Kill For, Dwight gets his face changed after sustaining some fairly fearsome injuries and, when the bandages come off, he is revealed as the later version of the character which he was portrayed as in the previous comics/films. This is a great reveal and I was really looking forward to Clive Owen coming back for the last part of this movie as the Dwight we knew and loved in the first film.

Alas, it wasn’t to be.

Apparently Owen’s schedule would not let him return for his part of the role in this one. Now, personally, I would have waited him out because, although they’ve tried their best with prosthetics to make Brolin look like the version of the character Owen played earlier, when the bandages come off in the movie it kinda just looks like Brolin with a haircut that... really doesn’t suit him. This is the one thing that fails the movie big time, I reckon, because... if you haven’t read the comic, and most of the audience wouldn’t have... it doesn’t come across that Dwight’s face is supposed to be as it was in the first movie. Without Owen there to sell the illusion, the fact that there is even supposed to be a reveal here... rather than just Brolin with a scruffy mop top... is probably not something most people are going to pick up on. So that’s a real shame and, like I said, I wish they would have just delayed the film again and waited for Owen’s schedule to clear up. It wasn’t, after all, the first time this particular sequel had been delayed.

Aside from that though, Miller’s beautifully written noir dialogue and the heavy blacks and bleached out whites colliding with the reds, blues and yellows makes for another Sin City film which is pure visual poetry. And added to that you’ve got Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a brand new character to the Sin City universe, Rosario Dawson back as Gail (although not nearly enough of this gorgeous actress as I would have liked to see... she’s always fun to watch and listen to) and the always stunning Eva Green playing the title character Ava, literally A Dame To Kill For. And I’ll tell you people who have an interest in this kind of thing up front... Eva as Ava goes through most of the picture not wearing much of any clothes at all, for the most part... so in terms of the celebration of naked femininity on screen, she more than makes up for the lack of Nancy strutting her stuff like she does in the comics... although I still think it’s a bit of a heavy credibility issue to have a stripper who doesn’t strip, to be honest.

The music to the first film was supplied by Rodriguez himself, working with composers John Debney and Graeme Revell. For this one, however, he’s working with a composer called Carl Thiel but, honestly, you wouldn’t notice any change because the music uses themes and orchestration which are the dead spit of the style of the first movie in the series and the continuity between the two of them is completely copacetic, I’m happy to say. I can’t wait for the release of the CD of the score in September so I can give it some play.

One last thing I will say though is this... I don’t know why this movie has had such a disappointing weekend but I do know that the Sin City films are absolutely the kinds of films that are meant to be seen at the cinema. They are what film is all about and they are little masterpieces of modern art that, if ignored now, will resurface and be reappraised in decades to come and your support for films like this is badly needed so future generations don’t turn around and ask us all, through the mists of time, why only two of these movies were made. Minor gripes aside, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is an absolute corker of a movie and should appeal to true cinephiles the world over. Go and soak it up in all its 3D goodness on a big screen while you still can.

Looper

Time To Kill

Looper 
2012 China/USA 
Directed by Rian Johnson
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: Ever so slight imagery spoilers
looping back through time to confront you.

I’ll admit it up front. I, more often than not, just love stories based around the concept of time travel. Mainly because you can set up so many ironies and mind-blowing revelations just from tinkering with somebody’s past that it makes for some great tales. Stories that can explore ideas and follow through on arcs which remain inaccessible to fictional explorations in other genres. Like most good science fiction does, for that matter.

That being said, I really get angry when the basic temporal mechanics of a piece gets screwed up by mistakes of obvious logic in the story. Sometimes, a writer will fudge a common sense outcome of a change in time and run with it to make the rest of the story he or she has in their head a possibility, rather than find another, perhaps less obvious, route around to the sequences they want to drop in. Back To The Future Part 2, for example, doesn’t just fumble the ball in this regard, it darn well drops the ball and then ostentatiously kicks it out of the field in its complete lack of concern for the rules set up by the man made measure that is “the passage of time”. There’s a moment about a third or a half of the way through that movie when the whole rest of that movie, and the whole of the next installment, couldn’t have actually taken place in the realm of the Back To The Future universe they’ve set up, because a character returns to a point in his future which is no longer there because he’s already erased it. Stuff like that is just plain sloppy... not to mention as irritating as hell.

Steven Moffat, I feel, sometimes has the same problem with some of his Doctor Who story arcs... which sometimes tend to resort to what I call “the Tinkerbell syndrome” in their ability to reach a successful story conclusion. You know what I’m talking about. We’ve completely destroyed the science of the piece but, guess what, if you believe in Faires... it will magic it back up again out of the ether! That kind of lack of logic is used like a crutch too often sometimes (yes Pandorica, I’m looking at you!).

I’m happy to report that writer director Rian Johnson has no such problems with his new time travel dilemma movie Looper. Or if he does, then the sleight of hand with which he maintains the illusion of complete plausibility of a man who is in a state of flux because of changes to his past happening while he is at present in that past, sent back from 30 years in his future, is absolutely credible and makes absolute sense.

Consequently, Looper isn’t just a believable, fictional universe to find yourself watching... it’s a vital and, frankly, scary cinematic wonderland in which to get lost in for a couple of hours (or 30 years, take your pick).

I’d seen Johnsons debut feature Brick some years back on its initial cinema release, and I was completely blown away by it. So I was really looking forward to Looper until I started to see the poster marketing for it. Note to advertising agencies: comparing a well put together, moody and extremely gritty, time travel noir like Looper to a piece of rubbish like The Matrix, may put off fans of proper science fiction. Seriously, when I saw the advertising calling it “this years The Matrix” it really put my expectations down a notch. You might as well compare it to other, not so great and abysmally over-rated sci-fi movies like Avatar and Inception. However, like I said, I had seen Brick and so I went to take a look at this one regardless.

I’m glad I did.

Like Brick, everything in this movie works so well and comes together so beautifully that you just get swept along in the illusion of the thing. Everything works towards the focussing of a single vision all the way through... set design, knockout performances from everyone (not just the leads who are, obviously, excellent), music by Nathan Johnson which supports this movie in a different way to the way in which his music in Brick worked, marvellous editing... everything works together so well that you’ll feel the intelligence and single-mindedness of the writer/directors intent as every frame passes.

And it’s a harsh world in which you’ll spend your time. A plot involving killers called Loopers who close their own loop by killing themselves from the future as the beginning of their 30 year retirement plan is the main focus of exploration and the identity of a criminal mastermind from the future called The Rainmaker becomes the raison d’etre of the shenanigans in which our two main protagonists... who are actually the same main protagonist from two different points in time (and possibilities in flux in terms of the older of the two facets of the character)... become caught up in. It’s actually a simple plot when you think back on what you’ve seen after the movie is over... but Johnson pulls it off so intelligently that you’ll see where the big pitfalls could have gone and how he managed to avoid screwing with the temporal logic while pushing it right to the edge on occasion. There’s just one little mistake I think might have been made in one sequence towards the final scenes of the movie, but it’s the kind of mistake you seem to see in movies all the time these days (as if that should excuse it) and it may be the result of the film losing some footage in the final cut. Most people aren’t going to question it in the heat of the moment and I’m not going to point it out here... it doesn’t involve time travel.

I think what I’m trying to say here is... not only is Looper a good sci-fi movie... it’s an adult movie in a cinematic landscape which is constantly providing less adult orientated content. There’s also some stuff which is truly horrifying in it... such as the scene where the writer/director is showing you how a Looper can be damaged to change his own future self without actually screwing up the possibility of an infinitely different future, while also killing a second bird with the same stone and using this to show how the two/one main protagonist/s can communicate with each other. It’s all good stuff and will keep you dwelling on the implications long after the imagery lingers in your mind. I don’t want to spoil anything here but... the image of a man running for his life and having his foot disappear because his past self has just had it deliberately amputated to slow him down is not one I’m going to forget in a hurry.

So there you have it. A brilliant script, well acted, designed and scored, from a very young director who is an absolute master of his game. Anyone who thought Brick was a flash in the pan can think again... I think this movie will be pretty successful. Not necessarily at the initial box office take but certainly on home video formats and in terms of something that will still be watched with admiration and hailed as a minor classic in years to come. If you like science fiction, then Looper needs to go on your to watch list quick before it vanishes from cinemas as quickly as most movies made for actual adults do these days.