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. Sure, it assaults you right off the bat with a barrage of shameless callbacks, including a needle drop of “The Heat Is On” (a banger, to be clear), and it has the occasional clunky meta joke about the franchise. (“And then ’94 … not your finest hour,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character says, referring to the maligned third film.) But for the most part, the nostalgia bait works — it’s still fun to see Axel Foley improvise characters on the fly to…
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