Word: cops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Beatty looked good, but his rendition of Tracy was too boring for anyone to care. The film tried to paint him as a tough cop who doesn't play by the rules. He's supposed to be a "nothing-can-phase-him" kind of guy--he's bribed, he's tempted (Madonna brushes against him half-naked on all fours, asking for his affection), and he's kicked around--but still our leading man does not flinch or give in to avarice or lust. No. Tracy resists...
Picking up where Robocop left off, Peter Weller returns as Alex Murphy, a former Detroit supercop killed in the line of duty and brought back to life as a crime-fighting cyborg ("half man, half machine--all cop") by Omni Consumer Products (OCP), an intensely profit-driven private conglomerate which runs the police department...
...when he finally soloed in the first Beverly Hills Cop, the context was artfully fashioned for him. He was a mean-streets guy dislocatingly, dangerously plunked down on the bland streets of America's ultimate suburbia. He was poised between ambition and anger, between the need to ingratiate himself with the predominantly white mass audience and, at the same time, the need to tell it hard truths. He was a performer running risks with his audience, but more important, with his slightly schizoid self. Destructive possibilities -- of the comedian's always tenuous bond with his audience, therefore of career -- were...
...fear of self-destruction often leads to self-parody, and that, in particularly dreary forms, is what Murphy has been offering in recent years. In Coming to America he was all sweet reason. In Harlem Nights he was all sour obscenities. In Beverly Hills Cop II he was simply drowned out by a series of explosions. And now, in Another 48 Hrs., he is almost invisible...
...These are the only shots that have any passion invested in them. The rest of the film is all awkward maneuver, without wit or feeling. Screenwriters John Fasano, Jeb Stuart and Larry Gross labor to arrange a plausible reason to reunite Murphy's smooth crook, Reggie Hammond, with rough cop Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) and place them in the kind of violent situations and give them the kind of rude comic exchanges that made the original...