The Snapshot:
Taylour Paige is Beverly Hills attorney Jane Saunders, the estranged daughter of Detroit Police detective Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy, returning to his signature role), who gets into some hot water with her work and needs her dad’s help to get out of it.
(The movie Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is currently available to stream on Netflix.)
The Performance
The first time we see Jane Saunders, we don’t know who she is. Rather, we know she’s a litigator taking on a difficult case of a young Hispanic man falsely accused of killing a police officer. What we don’t know is who her father is, and why that’s sort of pivotal to the whole story. Soon enough, though, it becomes clear that her dad is the best cop in Detroit, the great Axel Foley, whose exploits in her current home of Beverly Hills are still legend more than three decades later.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise in a movie like this one, which isn’t going to have a lot of crazy plot twists. What emerges rather quickly after Foley shows up in Southern California is that he and his daughter are on the outs, and have been for years (that’s about as close to a twist as you’re going to get.)
While the rest of the movie is about Foley and his daughter saving her client and getting out of this thing alive, it’s also about a father and daughter reconnecting and rebuilding their relationship after it fell apart years earlier.
Jane Saunders is a very good lawyer, but she is also quite clearly Axel Foley’s daughter. She has the same verve and self-confidence as her dad, as well as his stubbornness. She’s furious when she learns that Judge Reinhold’s Billy Rosewood informs her dad about what’s happening and how much trouble she’s in, and she makes several attempts to turn down his help before she finally accepts that she’s not going to get out of this alive without him.
All that is fine, and pretty standard fare for a movie like this with its specific tropes. What raises it to another level, and allows Paige to shine as brightly as Murphy does in a terrific return to form, is when the pair needs to get into a club that is off-limits to them.
One of Axel Foley’s signature moves is to talk his way into a place where he has no business being. He turns up the volume and the self-righteousness, and people tend to give him what he wants and let him in where he shouldn’t be just to get rid of him (and because they’re afraid he’s going to cause them trouble). It’s a staple of the franchise.
In this particular case, Axel tells Jane to wait in the car, but soon finds himself stymied by a doorman who is even more self-righteous than he is. Just as he’s about to get the door proverbially slammed in his face, Jane appears and pulls a card from her dad’s deck. Almost effortlessly, she talks their way into the club, putting the fear of God into the doorman as she does. It’s both hilarious and fitting, allowing the audience to see that maybe Axel taught his daughter something after all.
Something else happens in that moment, too. There’s a sparkle in Paige’s eye that shows how much fun she’s having, playing opposite Murphy, who also looks like he’s having a blast. That’s something of a secret weapon good actors have, letting the audience know when they’re enjoying themselves on screen. Paige does it several times in Axel F, but when she does it with Murphy beside her, it’s downright thrilling.

Taylour Paige spent an entire decade trying to catch a real break. She worked throughout her 20s, getting little roles here and there. An episode of Grey’s Anatomy, a couple of episodes of Ballers, things like that. She got something with a little more juice in it in 2018 when she earned a supporting role in the biopic White Boy Rick, but the breakout year was 2020, the year she turned 30.
It was in that year that Paige showed up in two movies that put her on people’s radar. There was the small but key role she had in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, opposite Chadwick Boseman in his final role before he succumbed to cancer. That got her a lot of attention. She got even more by playing the title role in the indie dramedy Zola, based on a wild Twitter thread that went viral.
That movie, which is bonkers and worth heading over to Max to stream, offers Paige an incredible showcase for her talents. As Riley Keough’s Stefani goes increasingly off the rails on a road trip to Florida, Paige’s Zola, herself a stripper, watches it all happen and somehow retains some semblance of sanity in the proceedings. Seeing it all happen through her eyes is both frightening and hilarious, and Paige serves as a strong proxy for the audience throughout the 86-minute running time.
In the four years since that twofer, Paige has had a handful of roles, with two of them not having yet seen the light of day. There’s her work in Macon Blair’s remake of the cult classic The Toxic Avenger, which does not yet have a wide release date, and the drama Magazine Dreams, which is in limbo pending star Jonathan Majors’ legal issues.
This is why this role in Axel F is such a statement. Paige holds her own with Eddie Murphy, and that alone should be getting her a whole lot of new attention. For an actor of her talent, it’s very much the welcome kind.
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