It's amazing how the BHC franchise is seen as something of an emergency button marked "career resuscitate". Sure, there was an obvious sense of inevitability about a first sequel, and it pretty much followed straight afterwards, just restoring Murphy's stock after one less than stellar box office feature (The Golden Child).<br /><br />After that there'd been the classic Murphy of Coming To America, another huge hit, followed by a string of adequate - and probably better than their reputation - movies in Harlem Nights, Another 48 Hrs. and Boomerang. This then saw Murphy's stock drop again with the underrated but underachieving The Distinguished Gentleman... which is where Beverley Hills Cop III comes in.<br /><br />Though two or three years in the planning, it was the one designed to bring him back. Deservedly it was his biggest flop to that date, as it was, perhaps non coincidentally, also his worst movie at that point. A fat, bloated string of nonsensical set pieces that sees such indulgent turns as acting roles for all of Landis's director friends, it lurches from one meaningless sequence to the next. The behind the scenes documentary alledges that the writer didn't even know what the criminals would be using an amusement park for until very near the end of the project's genesis. That pretty much says it all... what WOULD a criminal gang be using a Disney-style amusement park for? The fact that the film was location first, plot second points at everything that's wrong with Beverley Hills Cop III.<br /><br />It's surprising that the movie misfires as much as it does, considering that Landis was behind two of Murphy's best pictures - Trading Places and the aforementioned Coming To America. That said, the absence of previous stars - Hector Elizondo stuck playing an obvious John Ashton clone in Ashton's scheduling absence - does hurt the picture, along with Murphy's phoned-in performance. That said, the move away from comedy and into action also doesn't help, Murphy getting his final "huh huh huh huh" after seeing himself and his friends shot and bleeding to death. Yet to compensate for the lack of a Ronny Cox or a Paul Reiser, they bring back Serge from the first film. While it's always amusing to see Bronson Pinchot attempting to make Eddie Murphy corpse on camera, the fact that a homosexual coffee house owner has now become an arms dealer shows how events frequently serve the plot rather than any form of logistical sense.<br /><br />All this said, Beverley Hills Cop III isn't a BAD film as such, and it's always watchable, if not terribly good. All of the edge that was there previously has gone, and the ludicrousness of the situations fail to engage the viewer. After this it was a flop vampire movie (made for less than Murphy's entire fee for Beverley Hills Cop III) before Nutty Professor was the one to bring him back. After that, Murphy went into a spate of successful child movies and a series of decreasing returns playing multiple characters using fat suits, culminating in reputedly his biggest-ever flop, Meet Dave. Cue Beverley Hills Cop IV....