The heat is on: Beverly Hills Cop is back.

ALSO: Aussie series Fake

This week’s Always Be Streaming newsletter is published from the newABW home office in Sydney, Australia.

Look, it’s not great. But, I enjoyed the throwback vibes of Netflix’s Beverly Hills Cop revival Axel F. As a franchise, BHC was never a favourite of mine as a kid, so I’ve seen very little of it over the years. The character nostalgia elements didn’t really do much for me, but the vibe nostalgia was a hit with me.

Where that vibe felt poorly calibrated was with the casting. I really liked Talour Paige, who is brought on here to co-star as Axel Foley’s daughter, but that character probably needed to have a lot more punchy charm than was on display here. Instead of a bland, cookie-cutter character, the film would play better if she had character traits reminiscent of her father.

I will always defend any Joseph Gordon Levitt casting and will do so here. His character here is similarly bland and he isn’t given much in the way of anything that resembles a character trait. But films like this need a straight man and he’d have been fine in it if the rest of the casting wasn’t so off.

I got the sense from the (very few) action sequences that I was seeing practical stunt work, which feels increasingly rare in movies these days. There was also a helicopter! Back in the 80s helicopters were all over every action scene in movies and TV.

Also worth a look is new Australian drama Fake on Paramount+. The show is about a feature print writer who has been unlucky in love for her whole life, so she has her guard up when she meets a wealthy former businessman (David Wenham) who seems to good to be true… and he almost certainly is.

The problem with Fake is that it takes until episode four to get halfway interesting. And, like the aforementioned Beverly Hills Cop, this has a lot of really under-written characters. Beyond some details in slightly on-the-nose exposition, the audience isn’t really given a sense of who most of the characters are. It also doesn’t help that Asher Keddie stars in this, delivering the same austere performance that she offers in every other show.

Fake does a good job at setting up the mystery behind the guy, which will keep viewers hooked. But there’s just not a lot else to grab onto with it.