Beverly Hills Cop II [Tony Scott, 1987]:
From the first scene, the tonal and aesthetic contrast between this film and its 1984 predecessor, is striking. The first Beverly Hills cop began with an upbeat pop song, which established a knockabout tone of mainstream entertainment, while also providing an ironic counterpoint to the film's opening montage of Detroit and its areas of economic adversity. From here, director Martin Brest launched into an introductory sequence that defined the film's effortless combination of action and character-comedy. It was a sequence that told us everything we needed to know about the central character, Eddie Murphy's fast-talking detective Axel Foley, while in turn setting up the clash of cultures between this blue collar professional and the world of greed, affluence and criminality that the titular location comes to represent.
Rather than begin with a similar scene of comic action, this sequel, directed by the unsung Tony Scott, begins with a percussive soundtrack over color-tinted images of downtown Beverly Hills, before launching unexpectedly into a violent jewelry robbery. The imagery, which was unfussy and presentational in Brest's film, is now heavily backlit, with deep shadows and a careful approach to composition. The cuts are short but match the rhythm of the music. The art direction and costume design stress style, glamour and decadence over functionality. It's a sequence of remarkable filmmaking ingenuity and proof of Scott's total command of the filmmaking elements. It's just unfortunate that such intelligent stylizations are often wasted here on a weak and derivative script.
The problems with Beverly Hills Cop II are manifest. On one side we have Scott directing a high-art heist movie that recalls the works of the “cinema du look” [where he applies the same incredible audio-visual aesthetics of his earlier film, The Hunger (1983), to a proper action movie], while on the opposite side we have a derivative sequel to Beverly Hills Cop almost intruding on this other, more interesting narrative. The script for the latter seems barely there and exists as a loose template for Murphy to improvise around. The same scenes and scenarios from the first film reoccur, giving this film an over-familiar quality. But everything about this new installment has been beefed-up and dumbed-down, resulting in a Beverly Hills Cop film that tries to play to the same audiences as Commando (1985) and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). A not uneasy mix of elements.
