When Beverley Hills Cop II came out in 1987, an Eddie Murphy Movie meant an automatic box office smash. After some career set-backs and serious box-office failures this was a pretty desperate measure on Mr. M's part to grind out another follow-up to his 1984 smash. Stranger still, this project involves a reunion with John Landis, even though Murphy once said Landis had a better chance of working again with Vic Morrow.
Throw in a budget that could underwrite the invasion of Brazil, and you have a recipe for a huge opening weekend and a gradual tail-off into oblivion. As an afterthought, the film tries to come up with a story, borrowing Hitchcock's cherished idea of setting a murder mystery in Disneyland but doing nothing with it apart from wreck expensive sets.
A raid on a chop shop in Detroit goes wrong when the cops come up against unexpectedly well-armed bad guys led by Timothy Carhart, an especially creepy suit with a sideline in killing people, including Axel Foley's (Murphy) loveable boss. After this setup, Axel traces Carhart to Wonder World, a Disneyland lookalike, and between visits to Beverly Hills to rope in series regular Reinhold, keeps going back to the theme park to shoot it out with suited villains on various Universal Tour rides in messy, spectacular but deeply uninvolving action scenes.
Landis yokes in Joe Dante, Ray Harryhausen, Arthur Hiller, George Lucas and other worthies for a numbing series of pointless cameos, but otherwise puts his talent on hold to crank out a soulless, faceless, worthless dud.
