James Proclaims!

This year saw a new entry into the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, some 40 years after the original and 30 years after the preceding outing. I quite liked Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, which was much better than it had any right to be. Indeed, so good was it, that I felt compelled to rewatch all of the earlier entries. To a greater or lesser extent I enjoyed them all. It’s hard to be objective about a series of movies that I grew up with, but I think the first two movies stand up pretty well today.

Unfortunately the only one with any claims to Christmasishness, is 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop III. Which is not really good at all. Even John Landis, the director, is on record as being pretty dismissive about the whole thing.

It isn’t really as if any of the Beverly Hills Cop movies are especially grounded in reality, but they manage to get a balance between action and comedy that works pretty well. The threequel is mainly just inexplicable silliness punctuating an incomprehensible plot, led by one of Eddie Murphy’s least funny performances. Ever.

That said, if only for reasons of nostalgia, I still quite like it.

Score for Christmasishness

Like most of the movies that make up my annual countdown these days, the Christmasishness of this movie is tenuous at best. It hinges on a (fairly feeble) plot device, in which the bad guys throw the authorities off the scent of their counterfeiting enterprise by pretending to print novelty money as part of a Christmas promotion for a theme park. It makes sense insofar as anything in the plot makes sense, but Christmas is not exactly pivotal to the movie and it’s not even especially pivotal to this plot device.