Beverly Hills Cop II

Beverly Hills Cop II
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Tony Scott
Screenplay by	Larry Ferguson Warren Skaaren
Story by	Eddie Murphy Robert D. Wachs
Based on	Characters by Danilo Bach and Daniel Petrie Jr.
Produced by	Don Simpson Jerry Bruckheimer
Starring	Eddie Murphy Judge Reinhold Jürgen Prochnow Ronny Cox John Ashton Brigitte Nielsen Allen Garfield Paul Reiser
Cinematography	Jeffrey L. Kimball
Edited by	Chris Lebenzon Michael Tronick Billy Weber
Music by	Harold Faltermeyer
Production company	Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release dates	May 19, 1987 (1987-05-19) (Los Angeles) May 20, 1987 (1987-05-20) (United States)
Running time	103 minutes[1]
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$27 million[2][3]
Box office	$299.97 million[4]

Beverly Hills Cop II is a 1987 American buddy cop action comedy film directed by Tony Scott, written by Larry Ferguson and Warren Skaaren, and starring Eddie Murphy. It is the sequel to the 1984 film Beverly Hills Cop and the second installment in the Beverly Hills Cop film series. Murphy returns as Detroit police detective Axel Foley, who reunites with Beverly Hills detectives Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) to stop a criminal organization after Captain Andrew Bogomil (Ronny Cox) is shot and seriously wounded.

The film received mixed reviews from critics on release, but it was a box office success, grossing $299 million worldwide, the highest grossing film of Beverly Hills Cop film series. Additionally, the film was nominated for an Oscar, as well as a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, for Bob Seger's "Shakedown". A sequel, Beverly Hills Cop III, was released in 1994.

Plot

Three years after killing Victor Maitland, Detective Axel Foley is working undercover on a credit card fraud case in Detroit. Simultaneously, BHPD] Captain Andrew Bogomil, Detective Billy Rosewood, and Sergeant John Taggart investigate the "Alphabet Crimes", a series of high-end-store robberies distinguished by monogrammed envelopes with an alphabetical sequence left at the scene. Abusive BHPD Police Chief Harold Lutz suspends Bogomil and places Taggart and Rosewood on traffic duty.

Bogomil is shot and injured by Karla Fry, the chief enforcer for Maxwell Dent, who is the mastermind behind the Alphabet Crimes. Axel flies out to Beverly Hills to investigate Bogomil's shooting. Axel connects the ammunition used in the robberies to Charles Cain, the manager of Dent's gun club.

Axel has Bogomil's daughter Jan research Dent's financial dealings. Dent is robbing his own businesses to finance firearms transactions with arms dealer Nikos Thomopolis, and discreetly using Cain as the front man for his operations. Bogomil was shot because his investigation was on the correct track.

Axel foils Karla's attempted robbery at a bank depot. He deduces their next target is Dent's racetrack. Hurrying there, Axel realizes the Alphabet riddles were designed to implicate Cain as the Alphabet Bandit and throw the authorities off Dent's trail.

Karla and the gang rob the racetrack and kill Cain. While Lutz publicly announces that the Alphabet Crimes have been solved, Axel notices some red mud at the stables, identical to that on Bogomil's shoes. This leads him, Taggart, and Rosewood to Dent's oil field, where Dent is making his final arms deal with Thomopolis.

The trio get into a shootout and destroy the trucks carrying the weapons. Axel kills Dent; Karla is about to kill him but is shot dead by Taggart. Thomopolis and Dent's gang are arrested. Lutz and Mayor Egan arrive; Mayor Egan thanks the trio for solving the case and fires Lutz.

Bogomil recovers and is becomes the new Police Chief. Mayor Egan calls Inspector Todd to thank him for allowing Axel to assist the BHPD, prompting Todd to chew him out over the phone and ordering him to return to Detroit for his real police job.

Cast

Production

Paramount Pictures had planned a television series based on the first film. Murphy turned down the series but was willing to do a sequel.^[5] Producers Simpson and Bruckheimer hired Tony Scott to direct due to his success with the 1986 blockbuster film Top Gun. The film was originally to be set and filmed in London and Paris; however, the script was re-written after Murphy expressed a reluctance to film outside the United States.^{[citation needed]}

Eddie Murphy's salary to star in the movie was $8 million.^[6] The budget of the movie was $27 million. Ronny Cox was going to have more screen time in the film, but couldn't due to his role in Robocop. Filming began on November 10, 1986, and concluded on March 25, 1987, after 135 days of filming.

Film editor Billy Weber said:

"Marty Brest had passed on the sequel, and Tony was available. But, he wasn't a comedy guy, so after we ran the first cut, Don and Jerry just looked around, and shrugged, and said, "Huh." It wasn't a comedy – it played like a straight action movie, which made sense, because Tony was an action guy, and that's what he knew how to do best, so it was really action heavy. We just never had a great script, and it never had a chance of being as good as the first movie because the script never got there. They re-wrote the script after the first screening and more jokes were shot and added in, and it brought it up a little bit. Eddie also started to act up on the set, the primadonna behavior was starting to show, and he was always late for filming, but he got along great with Tony."^[7]

Soundtrack

The song "Hold On" as sung by Keta Bill plays during the scene wherein Axel, Rosewood and Taggart confront Dent at the Playboy Mansion. However, the film's soundtrack album, released by MCA Records, includes only a different version sung by Corey Hart, with different lyrics. The film introduced George Michael's controversial song "I Want Your Sex", a number 2 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. It also includes "Cross My Broken Heart" by The Jets (a Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100) and "Shakedown" by Bob Seger (which became a No. 1 hit on that same chart), as well as "Better Way" performed by James Ingram. The Pointer Sisters scored a moderate hit with "Be There" (#42 on the Hot 100), their single from the soundtrack. It was the second time the sisters had contributed to the Beverly Hills Cop franchise; they'd notched a top 10 single with "Neutron Dance" from the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack. Harold Faltermeyer's 1988 album, Harold F, includes a song called "Bad Guys", which is used as part of the film's score—an instrumental section of the song plays during the opening jewelry store robbery scene, and also during several other scenes throughout the film.

The soundtrack debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 albums charts and spent 26 weeks on the charts, a far cry compared to the 49 weeks spent by the first film's soundtrack. Despite this, one song from the album, "Shakedown", was nominated for an Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. However, another song from the album, "I Want Your Sex", won the Razzie Award for Worst Song, despite it going on to achieve a platinum certification for sales by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Reception

Box office

Beverly Hills Cop II was one of the most anticipated films of 1987 and became a box office success upon release.^[8][9] The film debuted at number one at the US box office, earning $33 million on its opening weekend, a sales mark that would result in the film achieving that year's highest-opening weekend debut, as well as the highest grossing opening weekend of all time at the time. Beverly Hills Cop II grossed $153,665,036 in the United States and Canada, becoming the third biggest hit domestically at the box office that year, after Fatal Attraction and Three Men and a Baby, and grossed $276.6 million worldwide, the second highest-grossing film worldwide that year, behind Fatal Attraction.^[10][11]

Critical reception

The film received mixed reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 46% "Rotten" rating, based on 39 reviews, with an average rating of 5.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Eddie Murphy remains appealing as the wisecracking Axel Foley, but Beverly Hills Cop II doesn't take him – or the viewer – anywhere new enough to justify a sequel".^[12] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 48 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".^[13] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.^[14]

Desson Howe of The Washington Post called it "a sequel that's as good as the original, if not better."^[15] Roger Ebert gave the film one star out of four and wrote, "What is comedy? That's a pretty basic question, I know, but Beverly Hills Cop II never thought to ask it."^[16] Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that the film is a skillful clone of the first film that can't match that one's novelty or excitement.^[17] Variety called it "a noisy, numbing, unimaginative, heartless remake of the original film."^[18] Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "It's hard to believe that the group who came up with the hard, clean edges of Top Gun, sleek and unfeeling though it may have been, could make a picture as crude, as muddled, as destructo-Derbyish as this one."^[19]

"Beverly Hills Cop II was probably the most successful mediocre picture in history," Murphy said. "It made $250 million worldwide, and it was a half-assed movie. Cop II was basically a rehash of Cop I, but it wasn't as spontaneous and funny [as the original]."^[20]

Accolades

Literature

• 1987: Robert Tine: Beverly Hills Cop II: A Novel, Pocket; Mti edition, ISBN 978-0671645212

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Beverly Hills Cop II.

• Beverly Hills Cop II at IMDb
• Beverly Hills Cop II at Box Office Mojo
• Beverly Hills Cop II at Rotten Tomatoes
• Beverly Hills Cop II at Metacritic
• Beverly Hills Cop II at the American Film Institute Catalog

This page was last edited on 15 April 2024, at 10:55