Your correspondent had the misfortune to catch the end of Beverly Hills Cop III the other day, and was devastated. I’d always suspected that it was the worst of the three, but had never actually seen it – little was I prepared for what a soulless, lazy and insincere atrocity it would turn out to be. It was as if all the good work done by the first, and kept afloat by the second, was destroyed in a nuclear blast. Only the cockroaches were left. Judge Reinhold scuttled about, doing his ‘loveable fool’ act. Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley wisecracked in front of a slow moving train, and traded innuendos with sleazy looking women from a wheelchair. Taggart was, wisely, nowhere to be seen. There were lame remarks about a theme park that was obviously supposed to be Disneyland, and the ending left you feeling as if anything that was ever good in the world had been torn apart and burnt on a pile of tires. It was offensive.
Wonderfully, Eddie Murphy thinks so too – he said it was ‘horrible‘ – so hope is on the way with the mooted Beverly Hills Cop IV. Let’s hope it’s more Die Hard 4.0 than Indiana Jones And The Crystal Skull.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 