Beverly Hills Cop II
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.
Beverly Hills Cop II
- Eddie Murphy
- Robert D. Wachs
Characters
by Danilo Bach and
Daniel Petrie Jr.
- May 19, 1987 (Los Angeles)
- May 20, 1987 (United States)
103 minutes[1]
United States
English
$299.97 million[4]
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[edit]
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 mostly high-end-store robberies distinguished by monogrammed envelopes with an alphabetical sequence that the assailants leave at the scene.
Complicating matters is the new political state of the BHPD, headed by new Police Chief Harold Lutz, who's incompetent, egotistical, verbally abusive, and doing everything he can to stay on Mayor Ted Egan's good side. Furious when Rosewood calls the FBI to help solve the case, Lutz blames Bogomil as commanding officer and suspends him, despite Bogomil's efforts to convince him that Rosewood was only following a hunch. Lutz also punishes Taggart and Rosewood by placing them on traffic duty.
On the way home, Bogomil is shot and injured by Karla Fry, Maxwell Dent's chief enforcer, who is secretly the mastermind behind the Alphabet Crimes. Hearing about the shooting on the news, Axel secretly abandons his current undercover duties and immediately flies out to Beverly Hills to investigate Bogomil's shooting alongside Taggart and Rosewood.
Posing as an undercover FBI agent to get past Lutz with the aid of Detective Jeffrey Friedman, his Detroit partner, Axel soon makes the connection between the robberies and Dent. He first discovers the ammunition fired at one of the robberies was made by a gunsmith for Charles Cain, the manager of Dent's gun club.
Axel has Bogomil's daughter Jan use her insurance agent connections to find out about 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.
Having foiled an attempted robbery at a bank depot, Axel tricks Dent's accountant Sidney Bernstein into letting him use his computer and discovers Dent and Karla are planning to leave the country. He also learns from Jan that all of Dent's businesses have had their insurance coverage canceled and are about to go bankrupt—except his racetrack. Hurrying there, Axel solves the latest riddle sent to the police, and is convinced that it was made easily solvable to implicate Cain as the Alphabet Bandit and throw the authorities off Dent's trail.
The trio arrive too late to prevent the robbery and find Cain, shot by Karla, among those killed. 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 manage to destroy the trucks carrying the shipments with explosives. Dent confronts Axel in the warehouse, but Axel gets distracted by one of Dent's henchmen on the roof above him so Dent gets away. Dent then crashes through the wall with his car and Axel kills him by shooting him through the windshield. The car hits Axel and goes down a hill, erupting in flames. Karla appears and is about to kill him but is shot dead by Taggart.
Just as the last criminals are about to flee, the police back-up arrive and apprehend Thomopolis and the remainder of Dent's gang. Lutz and Mayor Egan arrive as well; Lutz is furious at Rosewood and Taggart for their insubordination, but the pair frustratedly stand up to him and prove that Dent was the real Alphabet Bandit and that his crimes were about the arms deal. They also convince the mayor of Lutz's incompetence, prompting him to fire him for his jeopardizing the investigation and abusive attitude towards his men. Mayor Egan also thanks the trio for solving the case.
Following his recovery, Bogomil is chosen to become the new Police Chief. As Axel prepares to return to Detroit, 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.
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
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[edit]
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]