Still sucks

What makes comic actors want to shirk their comic responsibility? Is the longevity for comedians so short? Do they all want to win Oscars and be taken seriously? Do the laughs start to feel like they require too much effort? “Beverly Hills Cop 3” isn’t so much a movie as an existential crisis. Thankfully Eddie moved on, otherwise this could only be worse.


Here Murphy’s Axel Foley goes back to L.A this time investigating the man, Ellis DeWald (Tim Carhart), who murdered his police chief during a raid. There’s more to it, involving the secret service keeping Foley at arm’s length because they are running their own investigation on the man, and Foley ignoring all orders anyway is one of the few recognizable things about him here.


Turns out DeWald is actually head of security for a theme park known as Wonderworld. It’s owned by a kindly old white haired man who surrounds himself with fairy tale critter mascots, and it’s loaded with lame ass rides that only jostle people a little bit, and you just know are there because, later, action sequences are going to require them.


The film is not totally without humor but when we get more out of Judge Reinhold’s Billy Rosewood, something has probably gone wrong. Billy has a long, convoluted job title now worthy of a few laughs, but gone is John Ashton as his repartee sparring partner Taggert. An underutilized Hector Elizondo plays a character replacing him.


The surprise of the film is how much of a straight man Murphy seems like here. You barely get any of the characteristic grin or the playful pranking, scamming, and wisecracking we’ve come to expect of this character. At one point he even has a chance to humiliate the villain but instead the scene ends with a punch, not a punchline.


Also all wrong is a tilt a whirl scene where Foley does all sorts of death defying stunts, jumping from car to car, in order to save some kids in a malfunctioning car high in the air. These kinds of superheroics are so uncharacteristic it feels like the filmmakers have lost the plot on what Foley is entirely.


Was this meant to be an audition for Murphy to be the next big action hero? There’s more of him crawling through vents, dodging bullets, explosions, henchmen, and investigating than being funny. He also seems to be taking this plot very seriously, a mistake since its superfluous nonsense, the cutesiness of the theme park setting making it even worse.


The ending shoot-out I mentioned earlier eventually does come and it’s as bad as I remember it. From the cheesy Jurassic Park world the film does almost nothing with, to all the henchmen with machine guns who can’t hit crap, this is generic action defined.


Really if you’re looking for positives here, there aren’t many. I liked that Bronson Pinchot’s Serrrge is back from the first movie and he’s a firearms seller (for Protection, Prestige, and prettiness) and Theresa Randle tries to strike some fireworks with Murphy, if only he appeared to care.


Another odd thing about this movie is that it brought Murphy and director John Landis back together, after a big drag out feud they had on “Coming to America”. They claim their relationship evolved to the point where they could work together again. However, if this is them evolved, I don’t even want to know what devolution looks like.