May 25, 1994
BEVERLY HILLS COP is one of those movies that was huge for me as a kid, but that I don’t really care much about anymore. Its significance to me was that it was my first theatrical R-rated movie and an important early chapter in my appreciation for the art of cursing. Also my brother bought sheet music for Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F Theme” and learned to play it on piano. That song is still a jam, but the movie is just one of those things I see parts of on cable and find some bits mildly amusing. I thought I remembered liking the very stupid, but more stylish sequel directed by Tony Scott when I watched it a long time ago, but reading my review again I don’t sound all that enthused.
For those reasons I was actually pretty optimistic about checking out BEVERLY HILLS COP III (which I definitely didn’t see in theaters, think I saw on video at some point, but maybe not because it didn’t seem very familiar). I figured since I don’t have much of an attachment to those other ones I would be more open to it than all the people who hated it at the time. And though I understand the modern rejection of director John Landis (COMING TO AMERICA) due to the fatal helicopter crash on the set of TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE, I happen to really love some of his movies, and think he’s a good director. Plus this is written by Steven E. de Souza (48 HRS., COMMANDO, THE RUNNING MAN, DIE HARD, RICOCHET). And the one thing I remembered was that there were scenes shot at Great America, a theme park my family used to go to when visiting grandparents in California. I thought that might be cool to see.
Um, yeah, this is pretty bad though. Starts out semi-interesting, gets very tedious. Oh well.
Detroit police detective Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy, TRADING PLACES, BOOMERANG) is back to busting car thieves in the Motor City, showing up at the door and asking “Is this the illegal chop shop?” Funny, Axel, but we heard that one before. He convinces his superior officer (real life police officer turned politician Gil Hill) that he doesn’t need the S.W.A.T. team for this bust because they’re non-violent, which is one of the semi-interesting parts until the boss gets killed by guys with machine guns and the lesson is that Axel’s de-escalation attempt was a mistake.
But the thing that’s cool here is that the actual guys working in the shop are not evil, and in a very John Landis touch are introduced dancing around lip syncing to “Come See About Me” by The Supremes. I had a genuine laugh when one of them got so into it he did a cartwheel. You don’t want these goofballs to get into too much trouble, especially after they inform the guy who hired them that they don’t hurt people in their robberies. But the boss is a psycho named Ellis DeWald (Timothy Carhart, PINK CADILLAC, THELMA & LOUISE, RED ROCK WEST) who shoots them as soon as he verifies that they have the cargo he needed from a stolen truck.
There’s a pretty cool car chase, but Axel’s pursuit is stopped by Secret Service agent Fulbright (Stephen McHattie, DEATH VALLEY), who says he has to let the killer go so the federal government can surveil him as part of a larger investigation. This does not go over well with Axel.
When DeWald got out his gun it was wrapped in a towel with the name Wonder World Hotel embroidered on it. For a second I liked that because I took it as a funny gratuitous detail, but of course it’s a fuckin clue, what would usually be a matchbook, a thing to send Axel to California seeking revenge on the cop killer who must have gone to this theme park we all know of called Wonder World. So Axel goes to Beverly Hills to see Rosewood (Judge Reinhold, RUNNING SCARED), now proudly the Deputy Director of Operations for Joint Systems Interdepartmental Operational Command (an agency that has a big map on the wall and can cross into different L.A. jurisdictions).
Ronny Cox turned this one down, so his character is not mentioned. John Ashton was not available, so Taggart is said to have retired. It didn’t occur to me that he was in the script and just rewritten as Rosewood’s new partner John Flint (Hector Elizondo, Fish Police), so I assumed Flint would turn out to be corrupt. Kinda nice that he’s just a goof. Otherwise though it goes in every direction expected – for example, Flint tries to help by sending Axel to his old friend who’s head of security at Wonder World, and of course when he sees him it’s the killer, DeWald.
So big stretches of the movie take place at this thematically inconsistent theme park, which in matte shots has a big castle in the middle like Disneyland. Their mascot is a blue elephant called Okey Dokey, who has a certain dance he does. Their biggest attraction is Alien Attack, which is recognizable as the Earthquake ride from Universal Studios (a gas truck slides toward the tram, there’s a flood) but with a robotic Cylon from Battlestar Galactica shooting lasers around. There’s also a dark ride called Land of the Dinosaurs with animatronic wooly mammoths and stuff. Crazily, the park has its own jingle written by Robert and Richard Sherman, the legendary siblings behind a bunch of songs for the actual Disneyland, as well MARY POPPINS, THE ARISTOCATS, etc. They also have a cameo. (Richard just died on Friday. R.I.P.)
This might be just my own hangup, but I find it annoying for a movie like this to have a fictional theme park that’s obviously a stand-in for Disneyland but based on various generic cartoon pigs and elephants and stuff that you can’t imagine actually being this popular. Walley World works in the comedic world of VACATION, but BEVERLY HILLS COP ostensibly took place in reality, and it just seems like such Saturday morning cartoon bullshit to see all these bootleg retro animation characters crammed together with a selection of unrelated carnival rides. It’s not supposed to be some shoddy knock off, it’s supposed to be a hugely popular destination. Everybody, even Axel, is worshipful of Wonder World’s lovable old man creator “Uncle Dave” Thornton (Alan Young, voice of Scrooge McDuck), who teams up with Axel to uncover the plot (until DeWald shoots him with Axel’s gun).
Part III stretches reality in another way too – they get into a little bit of near future satire type stuff, like the Beverly Hills Police Department forcing guests to talk to an automated system with an endless menu (one of the jokes is that it’s available in Farsi – who would speak Farsi? What a crazy language!), and especially the commercial for a sci-fi-looking assault rifle called the Annihilator 2000, designed for “the upper income urban survivalist.” Bronson Pinchot’s breakout character Serge has another big scene (one of the funnier parts just because of his performance) and the strange premise is that he now sells arms instead of clothes. This kind of stuff seems odd for the series, and I’m not sure if it’s a Landis addition or if de Souza was ramping up for JUDGE DREDD.
Really the only thing I remembered about the movie (maybe from seeing it, maybe from ads) was that there was a scene involving a Great America ride called Sky Whirl. In the movie they renamed it The Spider, and back in the day my family called it “the Tweety cages” because we never remembered the actual name and the place had Looney Tunes characters as the mascots. It’s these big arms that each raise up and spins around a circle of these birdcage shaped things you sit in. In the movie, security wants Axel off of the ride so they yank on some levers, causing all the machinery to fail and the whole ride to start falling apart. Pure negligence, and of course there’s zero accountability for it.
Axel sees a cage that has flipped open, and two small children are about to fall to their death, and also it turns out he must be some kind of circus acrobat or parkour expert, because he begins to leap from cage to cage and somehow finds a rope and holds on with one hand and gets them safely to the ground just before the cage falls. It’s a long, complicated sequence that makes no sense, and makes the most ludicrous DIE HARD sequel moments seem like gritty realism by comparison. But there are a bunch of shots that are clearly stunt men hanging off of the actual Sky Whirl and that’s kind of mindblowing to see.
I’m not really sure if all the security guys are in on (spoiler if you didn’t figure it out I guess) DeWald’s counterfeiting scheme, but that would explain why they’re so over-the-top in their methods. In other ways they’re lax – Axel is able to just walk into an employees only door, down through a tunnel and into backstage ride control rooms without anybody paying any attention to him. That’s how he meets Janice Perkins (Theresa Randle, JUNGLE FEVER, CB4, George Clinton’s “Last Dance” video), a park employee who helps Axel and looks at him admiringly without ever technically becoming a love interest until the last scene.
There are various contrived shenanigans – including a part where Axel is surrounded by security in crowded Wonder World and fires a couple shots into the air before putting his gun down!? – leading up to a finale where the bad guys chase Axel through the rides. It made me think about Richard Stark’s Slayground, where Parker has to sneak around an off-season theme park killing his pursuers one by one. Sure enough I read that de Souza was originally hired to write it as “DIE HARD in a theme park.” But after THE DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMEN flopped they lowered the budget and couldn’t afford to include some of the rides he made up for it.
At the end Uncle Dave survives and announces that he has created a new cartoon character called Axel Fox, in honor of Axel. It is legitimately cool to know what inspired such an iconic character, I was not aware of that background and it adds so much more depth to his funny cartoons. What a wonderful character, Axel Fox. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love that little guy.
Landis has claimed he didn’t like the script but expected Murphy to improvise and make it funny, only to find that Murphy wanted to take the character more seriously now. I didn’t notice him not trying to be funny, I just didn’t think he was succeeding as much. Landis does put his fingerprints on the movie in the form of his trademark director cameos: Arthur Hiller, Ray Harryhausen, George Lucas as “Disappointed Man” (Axel cuts in front of him for the last seat on The Spider, then it gets destroyed, so poor George never gets to go on it).
That’s the funniest one, but the one that really surprised me was John BOYZ N THE HOOD Singleton as a fireman who tells Flint that “some fool named Axel Foley” shot Uncle Dave. In retrospect it makes sense, because he’d directed Eddie in the “Remember the Time” video a few years earlier. Anyway, it’s funny, because I mentioned him in my reviews of Matty Rich’s THE INKWELL and Spike Lee’s CROOKLYN, but I didn’t realize he had a summer of ’94 movie of his own.
Another “yep, it’s a John Landis movie” touch is that the Reverend Al Green plays the reverend at the Inspector’s funeral, singing “Amazing Grace.” And it seems like the act of someone with good taste in music to hire Nile Rodgers (ALPHABET CITY) to do the score. Unfortunately, instead of any of the styles he’s associated with he does a more traditional orchestral score that seems really overblown for this. Reworking the synth-based “Axel F. Theme” in that style seems like one of those things that you try and then when you hear what it sounds like you realize “oh, no, we can’t do that, that’s actually offensive to listen to,” but this particular production does not respect those sorts of boundaries.
At least it’s not as bad as when they do it as wacky cartoon music while Axel is walking around in the Okey Dokey costume. (Yes, of course that’s something that happens. And he gets in a fight with a little kid whose grandma is played by Helen Martin (COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, DEATH WISH, HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE, A RAGE IN HARLEM, DOC HOLLYWOOD, HOUSE PARTY 2).
Song-wise the soundtrack is okay I guess. There’s a Tony! Toni! Toné! song, Chante Moore, Patti LaBelle, INXS for the non-R&B fans. When Axel gets ahold of the aforementioned Annihilator 2000 it has a built-in radio that starts playing an Eazy-E song called “Luv 4 Dem Gangsta’z.”
Unfortunately the Pointer Sisters, who did “The Neutron Dance” for part I and “Be There” for part II, did not return. I assume they retired and moved to Phoenix like Taggart.
The other BEVERLY HILLS COPs were produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, but they left their deal with Paramount in part because they wanted a bigger budget for this one. At first they were replaced by the other (in my view better) big name spectacle producer of the era, Joel Silver, but he also quit over budget issues. So it became less of an action movie under producer Mace Neufeld (THE OMEN, THE FUNHOUSE). It’s funny that Landis directed some of the most over-the-top car chase mayhem ever for his soul musical THE BLUES BROTHERS, and then when he did an actual cop movie there was no way to live up to it! That speaks both to the untouchability of the former and the chintziness of the latter. For the record, though, the budget of BEVERLY HILLS COP III is more than THE BLUES BROTHERS, BEVERLY HILLS COP and BEVERLY HILLS COP II combined.
I guess the nicest thing I can say about this one that I haven’t already is that it’s still kinda funny to see Axel see things he thinks are crazy and just have a big smile on his face. The standard protocol is to make some wiseass remark to belittle somebody like that, but he just chooses to keep it to himself and emanate joy. There’s some residual sense of what made the character funny. But not enough.
May 28th, 2024 at 9:53 am
Okay, I have to admit that the BHC series is one that I know I should like, but never really did. I don’t hate them, but whenever I try to check them out every few years, there are bits and pieces that I enjoy, but as a whole they all fall flat to me. (And yet, just like with BAD BOYS, another series that I don’t really care for, I will watch every sequel as soon as I get the chance.)
That said…this one here is the only one as of today that I actually quite like. It’s not good good, but I think it is the least boring. And you have to admit, as dumb as “Axel has to save not-Walt Disney from counterfeiters who hijacked his amusement part” is for a BHC sequel, it is a pretty original plot for an action movie. Or any movie!
And there is this thought in my head of hardcore BHC fans going to the theatre on opening day and are downright horrified when the maybe biggest action setpiece is “Axel has to safe two kids from an amusement park ride”.