Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)

“It’s On” for the third time as Director John Landis, who reunites with Eddie Murphy for the third time since 1983’s TRADING PLACES and 1988’s COMING TO AMERICA, for BEVERLY HILLS COP III. Released ten years after the first movie, Detroit Police Officer Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) returns to Beverly Hills and teams up again with Detective Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) to stop a group of criminals, led by a cold, vicious security boss named Ellis De Wald (Timothy Carhart - Thelma & Louise, Witness), who are running a secret counterfeit money ring out of an L.A. theme park called Wonderworld. The film also stars Héctor Elizondo (TV’s Chicago Hope) as Beverly Hills Police Detective Jon Flint, John Saxon (Enter the Dragon) as Wonderworld manager Orrin Sanderson, Theresa Randle (Bad Boys) as Janice, Alan Young (TV’s Mister Ed) as Wonderworld owner Uncle Dave Thorton, Jon Tenney (TV’s The Closer) and Joey Travolta (Oscar) as Detroit Police Detectives Levine and Giolito, Lindsey Ginter (Mercury Rising) and Dan Martin (Gridiron Gang) as thugs Holloway and Cooper, and a special appearance by Bronson Pinchot (TV’s Perfect Strangers) as Serge. The film also features a number of cameo appearances by well-known film personalities: directors George Lucas, Arthur Hiller, John Singleton, Joe Dante, Martha Coolidge, musical songwriter Robert B. Sherman, and special effects master Ray Harryhausen. The film’s screenplay was written by Steven E. de Souza (Die Hard, Commando, and 48 Hrs.). This was the 1st out of all the Beverly Hills Cop movies I saw when it came out on video, and I would never see the 1st two movies till I became a teenager. I loved Beverly Hills Cop I and II, but III was both good and bad. The reason I say that is because it had a lot of different things, John Ashton's Sgt. Taggart was replaced with Hector Elizondo as Jon Flint. Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the producers of Cop I and Cop II who left Paramount to work for Disney and went on to work on Crimson Tide, were replaced with Mace Neufield and Ronald Rehme, who did Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. The villains played by Carhart, Ginter, and Martin were more vicious than the past ones but good and Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley was more heroic than what he was in the first two movies. The Wonderworld theme park scenes were filmed at California’s Great America theme park in Santa Clara, which at that time Paramount Pictures owned the entire amusement park. The scene when Eddie Murphy saves the kids on the Spider ride and the climax of the movie were my favorite scenes. Murphy himself did some of his own stunts in the Spider ride sequence. Filmed entirely in Los Angeles, California from September 8th, 1993 to January 24th, 1994, with a budget of $50,000,000, the film was released on May 25th, 1994 with $15,276,000 on opening weekend. It grossed over $42,610,000 in the U.S. and over $75 million in the foreign box office. BEVERLY HILLS COP III has been considered by critics and admittedly by Murphy himself as the most disappointing film in the series. I know this movie is a disappointment to Beverly Hills Cop fans, and I agree, but the only thing I liked about it was the action.