Editor’s note: This review originally appeared in the June 6, 1994, issue of New York. We’re republishing it to mark the release of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F this week.
In the dreadful Beverly Hills Cop III, there’s one hilarious sequence. Bronson Pinchot returns in the tiny role of Serge, who has left the art gallery that he inhabited in the original Beverly Hills Cop. Serge has opened the Survival Boutique, a salon for people seeking luxury self-defense items, including, of course, the Annihilator 2000 — a machine gun “for home and travel” that comes with a built-in compact-disc player. Ducking coyly behind his big nose, his long hair cloaking his neck and ears like chain mail, Pinchot compliments people on their looks and sells them on “colonics,” a method of retrieving intestinal wastes. I don’t know what is more satisfying — Pinchot’s piquantly garbled English or the desperate sweetness of Serge, an attentive, bustling man who wants only to serve the rich.
As Pinchot talks, there is nothing Eddie Murphy can do but stand and watch a comic at work. Certainly Murphy himself no longer believes in comedy. The original idea of the Axel Foley character — that he was a street-smart guy from Detroit who could talk his way in and out of posh situations in Beverly Hills — has been completely lost. Now he’s just a summer-season action hero, dodging bullets, crashing through sets, and taking part in wild car chases. (Gee, ever seen one of those before?) John Landis’s direction offers all the variety of a pinball machine — bullets bounce off everything and lights flash on and off — and while watching the movie, I felt myself float away. Except for Pinchot, there are no characters, no human qualities in it. Is an audience really out there ready to believe that Beverly Hills Cop III is a movie?
