step
on it:
beverly
hills cop III
speed |
director
John Landis
screenwriter
Steven
E. de Souza
based on
characters created by
Danilo
Bach
Daniel Petrie Jr.
producers
Mace Neufeld
Robert Rehme
cinematographer
Mac Ahlberg
music
Nile Rodgers
editor
Dale Beldin
cast
Eddie Murphy (Axel Foley)
Timothy Carhart (Ellis De Wald)
Judge Reinhold (Billy Rosewood)
Hector Elizondo (Jon Flint)
Theresa Randle (Janice)
John Saxon (Orrin Sanderson)
Bronson Pinchot (Serge)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 104m
u.s.
release: May 27, 1994
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other john
landis films
reviewed on this website:
- blues
brothers 2000
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Following the Peter Principle,
Beverly Hills Cop III rises to its level of incompetence
in its first scene and stays there. Once again, we're in Detroit,
and maverick cop Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is staking out a ring
of carjackers. Director John Landis, working for the third time
with Murphy (after Trading Places and Coming to America),
adds a touch that promises a return to the pop-fed wit that distinguished
Landis' Animal House. While Axel crouches outside the
garage, mapping out a strategy with some other cops, a pair of
rotund mechanics inside begin gyrating and lip-syncing to a Supremes
oldie blaring from a tape deck. This sudden musical interlude
has a wonderful randomness. But it leads nowhere: In a few minutes,
the dancing duo will be machine-gunned to death.
Beverly Hills Cop III is a depressing, abhorrent spectacle
-- big-studio cynicism incarnate. Products like this roll out
of Hollywood every summer, while filmmakers with something valid
to say languish in obscurity. In the past, the shrewd barracudas
of Tinseltown could put together a lowest-common-denominator
package and still manage to come up with something entertaining.
I honestly don't know whom Cop III is meant for, except
the executives at Paramount, who have watched their other franchises
(the Indiana Jones series, the Star Trek series
with the original crew, the Friday the 13th series) come
to a close and want to revive the Axel tentpole. Why is Axel
returning to Beverly Hills after seven years? The script, credited
to Steven E. de Souza, puts Axel on the trail of a corrupt security
mogul (Timothy Carhart) who operates a counterfeit ring out of
the theme park Wonderworld -- a bald swipe at Disneyworld, which
has been parodied beyond death, as has the 90210 lifestyle. Axel
is returning to Beverly Hills because Eddie Murphy and John Landis
need a hit. Cop III is as soulless as they come.
Landis is a past master of contrast, as he showed in the horror-comedy
An American Werewolf in London, and in that great elevator
scene in The Blues Brothers -- Landis kept cutting from
the heroes standing in an elevator playing peaceful Muzak to
an army of cops outside noisily preparing to nab them. In Beverly
Hills Cop III, Landis tries to bounce between action and
comedy, but he leans more heavily towards the action, which isn't
very well staged. When Axel, trapped in an amusement-park ride,
leaps from one car to another to save a couple of kids, the scene
has no snap, no tension, and obviously no plausibility. Landis
is good at bashing vehicles together, but any of us could do
the same given $60 million. He fails to do what Martin Brest,
who directed the first Cop, did so deftly: contrast the
streetwise Axel with the foppish pretentiousness of Beverly Hills.
The only contrast Landis achieves here is explosion/one-liner/explosion.
Has Eddie Murphy completely lost his comic gifts? He's occasionally
amusing here, but he lets his big, horsey grin do too much of
his work. Murphy played straight man to visiting lunatics Bronson
Pinchot in Cop I and Gilbert Gottfried in Cop II;
he seems to play straight man to everyone in Cop III.
Where are the inspired ad-libs that made even the bloated Cop
II bearable? Given the chance to score points off a pair
of grim-faced Wonderworld security guards the way he did off
a couple of cops in the original ("You're not going to fall
for the banana in the tailpipe?"), Axel just cracks a few
lame jokes. Cop III does bring back Pinchot as Serge,
gallery owner turned weapons dealer (huh?), but this time it's
a breeze for him to steal his scenes from Murphy. The star looks
tired, demoralized, in it for the money. Murphy once swore never
to make another Beverly Hills Cop movie and never to work
with John Landis again. He should have kept both promises.
As if to
show Landis and Murphy what a real piece of summer entertainment
looks like, former cinematographer Jan De Bont (Die Hard,
Basic Instinct) has made his directorial debut with Speed,
a gleefully reckless and unabashedly "high concept"
summer thriller. The plot? Mad bomber Dennis Hopper has placed
an explosive on a Los Angeles bus. When the bus goes above 50
miles an hour, the bomb is armed.  If the
bus then dips below 50, the bomb goes off. I would like
to think that the first-time screenwriter, Graham Yost, lit a
cigar and poured himself a cold beer after coming up with this
idea; it's so purely a Hollywood-summer-movie premise that it
seems entirely fresh, and the surprise of the movie is that it
doesn't get bogged down in boring, needless subplots or flabby
attempts at characterization. That bus, full of passengers, is
on the streets and freeways of L.A., and it cannot stop. It must
keep going and going, like an Energizer Bunny with a bomb inside
the bass drum.
De Bont keeps pounding the drum for two hours; the movie never
lets up. Crackerjack cop Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) manages to
board the bus, and he spends most of the film figuring out how
to keep the bus going, swerving around and bashing through all
the obstacles that the bomber (and De Bont and Yost) leaves in
his path. Along for the ride is Annie (Sandra Bullock), a passenger
who has recently lost her driver's license for speeding; naturally,
she's the one who has to take the wheel after the bus driver
is put out of action, and Bullock (from last summer's Demolition
Man) takes the wheel of the movie, too. A warm and sane presence,
she picks up the slack from her bulked-up co-star Keanu Reeves,
who, in his first turn as an action hero, is plausible enough
but a bit callow. As for Hopper, he spends most of his screen
time in his ratty apartment monitoring the action, but he makes
his presence felt throughout the movie -- he's like a psychotic
Zeus testing the mettle of Hercules, and this film gives its
Hercules far more than twelve labors. I'm sure that Speed,
like Die Hard, will be often imitated, never duplicated.
It devotes itself to the moment-to-moment ingenuity necessary
to keep that bus going, and the movie rockets right along with
it. On its own lowbrow terms, Speed is a triumph -- a
technical exercise so relentless, yet also so light of foot and
heart, that it comes close to the summer-movie version of art.
see also: speed
2: cruise control, the useless sequel
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