Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)

Beverly Hills Cop III arrives in 1994 as a franchise running on fumes and a star who had decided, against the advice of everyone within earshot, that his wisecracking detective should now be an adult. Axel Foley returns to Beverly Hills to investigate a counterfeiting operation hidden inside a theme park called WonderWorld, and the resulting film is a machine for delivering shootouts and a three-armed Ferris wheel rescue. John Landis directs with the weary competence of a man who knows the script is not a problem he can fix. The whole enterprise carries the faint odor of a contractual obligation, which is not a social statement, merely a business one.

The cast is genuinely mixed in the manner of 1990s buddy-cop product: Eddie Murphy at the center, Héctor Elizondo as his new partner, a rotating bench of Latino and Black supporting players. Nobody comments on any of it. The film has no interest in what any of this means, and that indifference is itself the finding. There is no romantic architecture beyond a park employee who smiles at the right moments, no engagement with race as a subject, no environmental sermon, no critique of the wealthy men running the counterfeit ring, who are simply criminals with a printing press. The villains want money. The hero wants justice for his dead supervisor. That is the entire moral ledger.

We are left with a curious artifact: a major studio sequel in which nothing is being argued and no one is being instructed. The picture is frequently dull, occasionally competent, and entirely free of sermonizing. For a certain kind of viewer, that absence registers as a relief. For the classification ledger, it registers as a long column of zeroes with a single modest entry. The theme park rides are the only things here with a thesis, and their thesis is centrifugal force. It is a strange legacy for a franchise, and an honest one.

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