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Show (0)uimcMe by Rick Brough ' i . A - "t VV,.. X .. fsW; . ---V jv: " V 1 - , i '. .- i ;V .'- - .. .... ;. " ' " ' L i.. - ..: V - :" ' . - ' v.. , , ,. ff- " Michael Chapman holds a gun to Eddie Murphy's head while a fellow henchman holds Lisa Eilbacher after they discover a large shipment of illicit drugs in Paramount Pictures "Beverly Hills Cop." Eddie Murphy stars in arresting comedy k A Classic Recommended Good double i feature material Time-killer For masochists only Beverly Hills Cop Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is ticked off because his closest friend has been killed by a pair of professional hitmen. (When they were delinquent childhood friends, Axel's buddy was the one who was caught by the cops, but didn't squeal. Axel became respectable as the most talented but undisciplined un-disciplined cop on the Detroit police force) Axel traces his friend's trail back to an icy Beverly Hills art collector. But as soon Foley begins asking the bigwig questions, six guys throw him through a window and he's arrested for disturbing the peace. (He asks the cops, "What'd you arrest me for" 1 if I was thrown out a car jaywalkin'?" Murphy is up against the crooks, the cops and a scrip originally set for Sylvester Stallone. But you can't imagine anyone else but him doing this picture. Murphy effortlessly brings off a combination of comedy and limber heroism, and an air of being pleased to hell with himself, which he doesn't over-use. For this movie, he also gives Foley a goofy laugh (is he competing with Thomas Hulce's Mozart in the Guffaw Sweepstakes?) Foley drives a conspicuously dirty Chevy Nova around Beverly Hills, but can still slip away from the well-tailored cops assigned to tail him. The "banana trick" he uses to incapacitate a car may, God help us, be imitated across the country. Eventually, he convinces the local by-the-book cops to take a few chances just in time to crack a massive smuggling ring. Even though Murphy carries the picture, it also benefits from a fine supporting cast. The two California cops charmed by Foley are played by John Ashton (as the old veteran) and Judge Reinhold (as the rookie. ) Lisa FJibacher is a nervy, if not especially helpful, female lead. And the two loathsome villains are Jonathan Banks, as a mad-dog killer, and Steven Berkoff (with a forehead dimple that looks like an old bullet hole) as the cultured heavy. By the way, why is it that, aside from cops and crooks, everyone in Beverly Hills is made to look fey? y2 2010: The Year We Make Contact On the second expedition to Jupiter, hero Roy Scheider reflects to himself that the space crew is likely o find "the answers are bigger than , the questions." Wrong. Here,' both are the size of a sequel, and certainly not of the magnitude suggested by Kubrick's "2001." The movie's plot is almost unintentionally optimistic. After 25 years, we haven't blown ourselves up yet! The U.S. and Russians are still locked in struggle over Central America and are about to come to blows over Honduras. Amid all this, a Russian space launch with three U.S. crew members heads for Jupiter to probe the mystery around (a) the mysterious monolith, (b) the disappearance of spaceman Bowman (Keir Dullea) and (c) why the computer HAL went awry. Scheider is a forthright hero, but plays Dr. Heywood Floyd, who was a bland bureaucrat in "2001." In this film by writer-director Peter Hyams, people are more vigorous than Stanley Kubrick's humans. At least, they're not supposed to be bland, but they look that way anyway. While the space crew works on, the movie refers ad nauseum to the Cold War problem back home. It's easy to figure out that the "answer" they get from the monolith will be a response to the impending war. The movie is well-intentioned, but after the cosmic suggestiveness of. Kubrick, it's a little anti-climactic to find simply that the monolith is all for detente. The ideas in "2010" seem routine or borrowed. The movie uses some nuts-and-bolts cliffhangers (Will the spaceship survive a dangerous braking procedure)? A plot revelation revela-tion leads to the rehabilitation of HAL the computer (the way Darth Vader turned out to be a good guy) with Bob Balaban cast as HAL's sympathetic programmer. John Lithgow has little to do except for a long scene where he suffers space jitters similar to his role in "Twilight Zone"). But his friendship with a Russian (Elya Baskin) is the most interesting relationship in the movie. Eternally-youthful Keir Dullea aged in "2001" for some mysterious but deliberate purpose. In his re-appearance, he jumps from old man to youth to babe like some teasing quick-change artist. At times like this, despite decent special effects and performances, "2010" looks like a recycling job. Missing In Action Chuck Norris gives us one of his better action vehicles as an ex-POW of Vietnam who insists that American prisoners are still being held there. When he flies to Ho Chi Minh City as part of an American delegation, the Vietnamese denounce de-nounce him on trumped-up charges of war crimes. Disgusted, he decides to use his own methods to find and free the GIs. This is a standard action feature-but feature-but it's fairly good. The action is plentiful. Norris plays a lean, tough hero without his usual flamboyant martial-arts displays. And to make the plot even more interesting, Norris is tracked by the ex-commander of his POW camp, now a high-ranking but still nasty Communist. Com-munist. "Missing in Action" gets stirred up against the more-than-fictional bad guys, but it isn't always aware of the effect it's making. When Norris visits a friend in Thailand for help, the movie shows, quite off the cuff, that this still-Westernized country is awash with prostitution, sleazy porno bars and ghetto grubbiness. It's worse than anything we see in Vietnam! , Still, it's interesting tq see the brief flurry of "bring-the-boys-home" movies, including last year's "Uncommon Valor" and Stallone's forthcoming "First Blood n." It's like a belated Hollywood effort to "win" the Vietnam War, by showing our movie heroes as they snatch the GIs from the clutches of the Vietnamese. Now Showing At the Holiday Village Cinemas: BeverlyHillsCop City Heat Not yet rated. Starman Not yet rated. |