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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June-Claude Van Damme: Knock Off (1998)

Knock Off doesn't know what it wants to be. That is the first problem it has. It also pairs Jean-Claude Van Damme up with Rob Schneider. That is the second problem. The fact that the action sequences aren't all that good doesn't help either.

Here's the plot. In fact, no. The plot is so cringe-inducing and risible that I can't bring myself to detail it here. Let's just say that Schneider and Van Damme run a business that sell knock off jeans and they get involved in a scheme that involves the CIA, murder, treachery, and dangerous jeans that have been laced with powerful explosives. Yes, this is a film based around exploding jeans.

Director Tsui Hark obviously thought that he could put things together in a way that would recreate the messy fun of Double Team but he ends up misfiring. There's one pretty good action sequence at about the halfway mark, the rest of the film is a damp squib. Visually ugly, never as amusing as it thinks it is, and lacking any character that you could care for.

Writer Steven E. de Souza should take a large portion of the blame. His script is consistently awful from start to finish. Not only does it lack decent dialogue and characterisation, it devolves into an utter mess after the first 20 minutes or so. It's hard to believe that this is penned by the man who gave us so many other modern action classics.

Van Damme flashes his smile here but it feels, in line with the film, lazy and insincere. He's selling a screen presence that isn't there, sadly. As for Schneider, I won't automatically dismiss him from movies because I don't mind him in the right role. This isn't the right role. Nobody here is in a role that feels right for them, not even Paul Sorvino as a stern CIA agent, and that's the kind of thing that Sorvino could probably do in his sleep. Wyman Wong does okay with his small role, and Lela Rochon tries her best, but this is not a film designed to showcase the talents of the actors involved.

If you want to see one action movie about exploding jeans then I can heartily recommend this as being the film for you. Otherwise, avoid it at all costs. It's STILL not the worst film in the Van Damme filmography (that one is still to come, from the many I have already seen) but it's definitely a contender.

2/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can pick up this pack.

June-Claude Van Damme: Street Fighter (1994)

Movies based on videogames are hard to get right. Movies based on videogame beat 'em ups are, arguably, even harder to get right. Videogames don't REALLY have to worry about things like plotting and fully-formed characters, although fans may argue that the best ones do have enough of both, and when they're turned into movies it is often the case that fans are disappointed, either by the casting or by the way in which a plot has been forced to fit around elements that now feel too far removed from the essence of the game. Maybe it's because I was never a huge videogame player that I actually enjoy quite a few of these movies. Mortal Kombat remains my favourite, but I've also enjoyed DOA: Dead Or Alive, and I even quite liked Double Dragon (although it's been years since I saw it so don't take that as a current, informed, opinion). And I find myself revisiting and enjoying Street Fighter a lot more than I ever thought I would.

Raul Julia plays Bison, a maniac who has taken lots of people hostage and demanded an astronomical sum of money. He aims to use that money to build his own empire but there are a number of people out to stop him, including Colonel Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme), a plucky reporter named Chun-Li (Ming-na Wen), and a pair of reluctant fighters named Ken (Damian Chapa) and Ryu (Byron Mann).

Written and directed by Steven E. de Souza (a man responsible for some of your favourite '80s action movies), Street Fighter is a film that gets a few things right and quite a number of things wrong. And I'm not sure which camp the casting of Van Damme as Guile belongs to.

There's no doubt that this movie is missing the dynamism of the game, as well as a lot of the special moves that came about after much skilled thumb-swirling and button-bashing, so it's almost inevitable that fans were disappointed by it (which is what I remember being the general consensus at the time). Some of the characters feel as they should, Andrew Bryniarski is particularly enjoyable as Zangief, but a lot of them are either near-unrecognisable or given short shrift in favour of time spent with Van Damme doing his star turn.

There's also no doubt (in my mind) that there's still plenty of fun to be had here. The fights may lack any oomph, to use the technical term, but everyone has fun in their roles, the tone is just close enough to goofy throughout, and you get a performance from Raul Julia that stands out as one for the ages. The man may "only" be portraying a videogame villain but, damn, he steals the entire movie, helped by a script that gives him some truly wonderful lines of dialogue to relish. You may one day have a list of a dozen movies based on videogames that you rank above this one, but none of them will have a moment to rival that in which Julia replies to someone who is reminding him of the time he raided their village.

It's not a knockout, but I tend to like this more every time I watch it. Maybe other people will feel the same way, as unlikely as that may seem to some of you.

7/10

UK folks can buy the film here.
Americans can buy this edition.

Sci-Fi September: The Running Man (1987)

Based on a novella written by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman at the time), The Running Man may be a few sidesteps too far from the original material for literary purists, but it's a whole heap of fun, thanks to the fact that the premise was retooled into a star vehicle for action icon Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Directed by Paul Michael Glaser (who will, for many of us, always be Starsky from Starsky & Hutch), the plot concerns a wrongly-convicted Arnie (playing Ben Richards) being given the chance to appear on hit TV show, The Running Man. Of course, he's not really got any say in the matter. The host of the show (Damon Killian, played by Richard Dawson) will do anything for even higher ratings, and it soon becomes clear that the show has no winners, thanks to the way that footage is manipulated, contestants are smeared, and lies upon lies are spoonfed to the ever-hungry audience. Oh, and the aim of the show? Avoid death by avoiding the armed stalkers who are sent in after the contestants.

It may be lesser fare when compared to the other big sci-fi movies starring Arnie, but The Running Man has a lot to recommend it. The script, by Steven E. de. Souza, focuses on media manipulation and how it can be used to control society, but it's equally just about Arnie fighting big meanies and then throwing out his usual one-liners.

The direction from Glaser is fine, with the visuals accompanied by another great soundtrack by Harold Faltermeyer (the man best known for creating the Axel F theme for Beverly Hills Cop). He sets up everything briskly, and the visuals reflect the featured game show, with everything shiny and new on the surface, yet slightly grubby and cheap when the main characters see behind the scenes.

Arnie is still in his Arnold Prime phase here, and absolutely brilliant. Dawson, well-known as a popular TV host in America, does an excellent job of subverting his polished, showbiz persona. Maria Conchita Alonso is fine as a young woman who doesn't believe in the innocence of Ben Richards, until some things just don't add up, and there are supporting roles for names as varied as Yaphet Kotto, Kurt Fuller, Jesse Ventura, Marvin J. McIntyre, Jim Brown, Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa. Yes, you read those last two names correctly. They both have minor roles in this movie.

It feels slightly dated nowadays, and was never really built to hold up over the years as an enduring classic, but The Running Man also manages to overcome that aspect, thanks to both the sheer entertainment factor and the fact that the look at media manipulation is even more relevant than it was back in the late '80s. In a world stuffed full of Big Brother, Britain's Got Talent, and so many other "reality" shows, it's good to remember that it's all done with editing.

8/10

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