Netflix And Chill: Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)

I reviewed Beverly Hills Cop quite a few years ago now. I rewatched Beverly Hills Cop II a few times, but kept forgetting to do anything more than a capsule review for it. But the time was right to finally revisit the undercooked Beverly Hills Cop III, a film that I hadn't been brave enough to revisit since it first hit the home rental market back in the mid-'90s.

The plot is quite simple. Eddie Murphy is back in the role of Axel Foley. The death of Foley’s boss leads him to investigate a crime ring that he believes is operating out of a Los Angeles amusement park. He reunites with Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), and quickly gets himself into a whole heap of trouble while trying to gather evidence that will lead to the prosecution of a bad guy that he KNOWS is the bad guy (Timothy Carhart).

This should have been another great entry in a series that was already two for two. Heroes & villains confronting one another against the backdrop of various  amusement park rides. Writer Steven E. de Souza is someone who has delivered some great action movies, but he’s also written some that were not so great. This falls into the latter category. The action isn’t good enough, the comedy not funny enough, which just leaves the whole thing as another fairly limp star vehicle for Murphy at a time when every Murphy film inevitably felt like that.

Putting John Landis in the director’s chair just have seemed like a very good idea, considering his past glories with Murphy in a leading role, but he ultimately doesn’t have a handle on the tone and what is truly needed for the series. There are the expected cameos you expect from a Landis movie, but not enough care is given to the plot (and let’s not pretend that Foley does any decent detective work here).

Murphy is still good enough in this role to make it watchable, and Reinhold is fun (although he doesn’t get any of the interplay he previously had with John Ashton’s character, notably absent here and sorely missed). Hector Elizondo is okay, but not really good enough as a replacement for Ashton’s character, and Stephen McHattie gets to come along every once in a while to lay down the law as an angry Fed. Carhart is a bit of a weak villain, commanding a small army of bland henchmen, John Saxon is someone you know must be involved somehow (due to being John Saxon), and Theresa Randle tries her best in a role that makes her a potential love interest/damsel in distress. Oh, and it’s fun to see Bronson Pinchot return for a scene or two, having moved from the world of art to the world of heavy-duty self defence.

The cast help make this more fun than it otherwise would be. It’s a bad film, but it’s a bad film that remains watchable, for the most part, if you don’t mind spending time with a likable main character on one of his lesser adventures. And it would have been even better if it had felt more in line with the previous two movies.

5/10

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