KWIF: Fly Me To The Moon (+1)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week Kent has a spotlight movie of which he writes a longer, thinkier piece, and then whatever else he watched that week he attempts a quick wee summary of his thoughts.

This Week:
Fly Me To The Moon (2024, d. Greg Berlanti - in theatre)
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024, d.  - netflix)

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It's not my original though, but rather something I believe I have heard on the Blank Check podcast...or maybe from Patrick Willems (or more than likely, both), that the Hollywood system is broken and there aren't any real movie stars anymore. Yes, there are famous people, celebrities, actors who are absolutely well known, but a capital M, capital S Movie Star would draw people to a movie regardless of what the subject matter was, regardless of what kind of movie it was.  The last 15 years of "tentpole/franchise/shared universe" filmmaking has trained the audience to value the role/character more than the performer behind it. Batman can draw millions of people to a film on name alone, Robert Pattinson cannot. Spider-Man is the movie star, not Tom Holland.

So a movie like Fly Me To The Moon comes out, starring two major name celebrities in what is sold at least to be a screwball romantic comedy, well, three decades ago that would be box office gold, with long legs certain to make at least 100 million domestic at the box office based on the pairing of these two hot people alone.

But Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, as famous as they are, are not Movie Stars. They are about as close as we get to movie stars these days, but their coupling on screen is only worth apparently 40 million globally over three weekends at the box office.  On a 100 million dollar budget (for the type of movie it is, that is crazy expensive) that's disastrous. But this is the movie market that Hollywood and their obsession franchises (and with streaming) has built.  For most people now, no celebrity is a draw, and most films aren't worth leaving the house for.  Nothing to do with the quality of the films or the charisma of the performers, it's all just what Hollywood has done to themselves and the market.

The film is fluffy, but charming. Johansson plays Kelly Jones, a marketing whiz in the 1960s who is pulled into working for NASA by shady fed Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson). NASA's mission to achieve Kennedy's promised goal of reaching new frontiers in space is about to face defeat to the Russian space program. With America also waging war in Vietnam (and Korea still a relatively fresh memory), plus a greater awareness of socio-economic issues the country faces, NASA's mission seems like a very expensive luxury that the country can't afford.  The marketing gloss Kelly is to bring is meant to sway congressmen to keep the funding coming. 

Nobody could care less about image or politics than Cole Davis. The veteran pilot and head of technology division, he's just trying to make sure the ships are safe (having been in part responsible for the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew when their cabin caught fire).  They have a very sparky meet-cute, but once Cole realizes Kelly is there to commoditize NASA he's at odds.  As the Apollo 11 mission to the moon looms, Kelly's tactics for securing funding seem to be everything that the program needed, and their relationship softens. But when Moe decides that the moon landing is too important to fail, he has Kelly set up a fake moon landing shoot, which she keeps secret from Cole, but it all feels like a disaster in the making.  Turn out Kelly has a secret past which Moe is using as leverage.

Fly Me To The Moon is not without its charms but it seems such an odd film to release in 2024. It toothlessly plays with conspiracy theories and in messes around with historical events intertwined with fictional characters it dances on a pinhead thinking it won't prick its feet.  The film opens with a montage of the 50s that feels very much like the opening to a season of the Apple TV show For All Mankind.  If you're unfamiliar, FAM is an alternate-history telling of the space race, one where Russia never gave up and things only accelerated, changing the face of history.  Each season opens with a montage of graphics, deepfake videos, recreations, photoshopped newspapers etc that presents the way monumental moments in history changed slightly (or dramatically) as a result. The opening sequence of Fly Me To The Moon had me feeling we were in store for a very different story about the moon landing.

Alas.

Tatum, at 43, is still boyishly handsome, and has a very natural way of seeming both competent at many things but still oblivious to other facets of human life that make him irresistibly likeable. It's hard to believe that Johansson is not even 40, yet, since she's been around since she was, what 15(?), she's is an absolute veteran, and knows how to command the screen, being funny, charming, so smart, and a little bit of dangerous even.  

The two of them together wasn't the steamy production I think we would have wanted to see from a pairing of them 10 or 15 years ago, but then this isn't a steamy movie.  It's kind of old fashioned in how it wants these two to hook up, and in that way, it's pretty chaste. A little romantic, but chaste.

I also can't help but think of my kids (22 and 15) looking at this film and thinking "hard no" to this "old people" romance happening on screen. I somehow became keenly aware very early in this film that this was an "old person's movie" and wondered who it was targeting.  And, like, who asked for it in the first place.

I think it will do really well on streaming, but that just reinforces the problem with streaming and it's impact on drawing people to the theatre.

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I like Beverly Hills Cop quit a bit. It's a great movie (with a few age lines and a couple of real '80's moments that wouldn't play today) that took a young Eddie Murphy, already a star, and spat out a superstar. Murphy was once a Movie Star, but he hasn't been for some 20+ years. But what he did when he was a movie star is still providing him with the benefit of the doubt whenever he stars in a new movie (which isn't often). I think the reason for this is we want Eddie Murphy back as we knew him: charming, shifty, talking circles around anyone, and with that hundred-million-dollar smile that always seems to come with a mischevious twinkle in his eye.  Eddie Murphy can play characters, but his characters are always unmistakably "Eddie Murphy characters".  His best character, hands down, is Axel Foley (some might love Sherman Klump or Donkey, but they're wrong and they know it). 

Axel, however, suffers in Murphy's pantheon because of the diminishing returns of the prior Beverly Hills Cop sequels, particularly as Murphy's ego started to get in the way of performance. But with over 30 years since Beverly Hills Cop 3, and a very public humbling post Norbit, Murphy's limited screen presence now seems to come with an "I got this attitude."  He's a man who was on top, tried to stay there, failed, floundered trying to climb back up there, before resigning himself to just being massively famous and rich with the ability to do as much or as little as he wants with no real pressure.  We should all be so lucky.

This fourth entry, with the curious subtitle Axel F (I heard it was Netflix chickening out of calling it "Beverly Hills Cop A.F." which is better, but also more cringe), opens with Axel and a fellow detective out catching a Red Wings game in Detroit. The banter is on point in this opening sequence, Murphy just running circles around his scene partner (but also providing such good setups) and any anxiety about the quality of the films started shedding away.  Quickly the hockey game becomes something more, a robbery that Foley was actually staking out, and Foley steals a snowplow chasing some ATVs around the city causing gobs of destruction and Foley the usual fanfare at the office. Any other reservations I had about the film vanished during that very lively, practically done chase sequence.  I wished I was watching on the big screen instead of Netflix.

Foley is suspended, per usual, and is drawn to Los Angeles when his pal Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) calls to inform Foley his estranged daughter, Jane Saunders (Taylour Page), is in trouble as the public defender for a young man caught up in something bigger than himself, and it's dragging her into it too.  Also Rosewood goes missing.

Foley then does L.A. Foley style, which find him constantly revisiting his tricks from the earlier films, only to diminishing returns, if any returns at all. Foley's schtick is so dated and ineffective, which is a hilarious development that had me both laughing and impressed. It's kind of meta, but it's not the usual kind of winky winky meta. It's more that Foley's shtick probably still works enough of the time in Detroit that he's still at it, but L.A. is so over it that they're not even willing to entertain what he's saying, and Axle is constantly having to be bailed out by his savvy, quick-with-the-improv daughter.

The crime story here is, like almost all 80's action-comedies, irrelevant. It's the line upon which the clothes hang. It's the purpose for which we see Eddie Murphy do his Axle Foley thing, but also with the added layer of family matters. I was hoping Page, who I loved in Zola,  would go from being the smart, responsible one to showing such Eddie Murphy-like colours by the end of the film, but that's not really who she is as a actress (and a bad Murphy impression isn't anything anyone wants to see). But she still manages to find a shine in Murphy's shadow.

Other actors appearing in this film include Joseph Gordon Levitt as both Foley's defacto partner and Jane's ex-boyfriend, Kevin Bacon as the bad guy (the film hides it for all of 40 seconds after his introduction, so not a spoiler), Paul Reiser as Axle's Detroit boss, Luis Guzman as a karaoke obsessed Latino gangster, Nasim Pedrad as a real estate agent, and of course Bronson Pinchot returning as Serge and John Ashton returning as Taggart.  Everyone seemed to be having a blast.

I'm as surprised as anyone, but Axel F was tremendous fun. It was not a necessary sequel by any means, but few sequels are. And it's by far the best sequel the series has. It's a big budget movie that does big, tangible action set pieces, and feels like a modern throwback to an 80's action film, while being utterly tied to said 80's action films. And, perhaps most importantly, it's funny, both in its script and in Murphy's mile-a-minute (okay, maybe he's down to half-mile-a-minute at his age) improv.

It's probably the most relaxed blockbuster action movie I've seen. It feels like a film that has nothing to prove, even though it truthfully should have been proving its need to exist every second of screentime. But it doesn't ever feel like it's trying to be something it's not, and in the end it's not trying to set up a sequel or a spin-off. It's a film that knows it has history, but it doesn't lean on it. If anything, it will just make you wonder why there haven't been 20 Axel Foley films over the years (but just rewatch BHC3 and you'll remember why)