Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)

Beverly Hills Cop II is one of the loudest and most obnoxious movies I’ve seen in a long time.  I’m not kidding, halfway through this movie, as Eddie Murphy and his buddy Judge Reinhold where smashing through a Beverly Hills neighborhood in a cement truck, I got up and excused myself to the restroom.  I didn’t have to use the facilities, I just wanted to get away from the movie, which was so loud and so piercing that I though that something might be wrong with the sound system in the theater.

Later, I spoke with a friend of mine who had seen the movie in a different theater and he said that he had the same experience.  This is a loud movie.  It is wall to wall with crashes, bangs, gunshots and screams overlaid with a persistent rock score that never seems to let up.

I wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of the original Beverly Hills Cop, but it was a masterpiece compared to this blistering exercise in noise.  That, by the way, extends to Murphy himself who I don’t think is playing the same character here.  In the first movie he was a tough street cop from Detroit with a laid-back attitude and a good instinct for police work.  But where is it here?  Murphy screams and shouts his way through most of his scenes to the point that you feel sorry for the person on the other end.  Why does he do this?  Does he want us to hate him?  He loud, angry, shrill and we want to get away from him.

The plot could have been injected into any action movie.  Chief Bogamil (Ronny Cox) is shot as part of a series of “Alphabet Crimes” that Rosewood (Reinhold) and Taggert (John Ashton) don’t seem to be able to solve.  Somehow Axel Foley is brought into the mix to solve the murders which seem to be connected to a cop killer, a gun smuggler and a leggy blonde (Bridget Neilson).

Movies like this make me angry.  They are not made with the audience’s expectations in mind.  Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer have paid millions for this script, but what does it say of their contempt for the audience?  That they can throw anything at the screen and the audience will line up to see it.  What are the returns?  The audience is pushed away by the wall-to-wall noise and the destruction of credibility to the possibility of a franchise that audiences turned into the biggest hit of 1984.  For their money in the sequel what do they get?  The same standards that they have already seen.  Shoot-outs, chases, men with money, dangerous woman.  Added to that, an obnoxious performance by Murphy that never displays his special qualities that he showed in 48hrs. and Trading Places.  If he cruises along at this pace, he’s going to break faith with his audience in a permanent way.