The title rips off a catchphrase of country music's spoofy Riders in the Sky. But the film displays none of the playfulness or satiric shrewdness of the Riders. While it is billed as an "urban action comedy," its action sequences are ludicrous and it's a "comedy" filled with point-blank shootings, crotch-kicking, throat-slashing, gruesome torture and a script that is basically a running conjugation and declension of the word "s—t."
Harrelson and Sutherland are rodeo stars from New Mexico who end up in New York City searching for Sutherland's missing ranch foreman, an elderly Cuban who has paid a sleazy coyote (McDermott) to smuggle his glamorous young daughter (Buono) into the country.
Harrelson is characteristically appealing, coasting in aw-shucks mode. Sutherland never seems athletic enough in the rodeo sequences, makes a laughable barroom brawler with his mincing walk and tendency to sound as if he's trying to deepen his voice, and he has none of Harrelson's comic timing. Hudson, as a sympathetic Manhattan cop, is a reliable pro who muddles through even the dumbest scene.
Director Gregg Champion, Marge and Gower's oldest son and a veteran second unit director, stages some lively Manhattan car chases but lets the tone and pace wander and otherwise settles for a most undistinguished second feature (the listless Short Time in 1990 was his first). Writer Bill Wittliff puts the boys through all the predictable paces—swanky Manhattan hotel, swanky Manhattan woman, tough Manhattan gangsters. He writes such dialogue as "We're not in the killing business, god damn it!" You would never guess this was the same guy who wrote the Lonesome Dove screenplay.
Somewhere along the way this might have seemed to be a snappy fish-out-of-water idea, a reverse City Slickers. In the execution, it evokes merely a more vulgar episode of Dennis Weaver's old TV series, McCloud. (PG-13)
Keanu Reeves, Alex Wiesendanger, Ying Ruocheng
Little Buddha is supposed to be all about enlightenment—a Tibetan Buddhist monk (Ruocheng) zeroes in on a little American boy (Wiesendanger) as the possible reincarnation of a beloved teacher—but it feels more like a guided tour of corporate headquarters. Every-detail is polished to a uniform shine, displayed in its proper place and accorded its due, hushed respect. Your part in this procession, which ranges from Katmandu to Seattle, is simply to gaze on in grateful awe. If you try to do anything more—if you wonder, for instance, how director Bernardo Bertolucci got it into his head that an audience wouldn't mind two hours of his condescension—you will probably just lose your temper.
Bertolucci intertwines the modern tale with the ancient story of Prince Siddhartha (Reeves, in a variety of togas, hairstyles and jewelry) and his search for spiritual meaning. This half of the film plays out as a series of lavishly illustrated, amber-lit tableaux. Trying to whip things up near the end, the director unexpectedly tosses in a few Cecil B. De Mille storm effects, and Reeves, finally achieving nirvana, is surrounded by a butter-colored nimbus that makes him look like a divine piece of toast. (PG)
Eddie Murphy; Timothy Carhart, John Saxon, Judge Reinhold, Hector Elizondo, Theresa Randle
Beverly Hills Cop III is resoundingly joyless. The latest and least in the movie series about the righteous Detroit cop (Murphy) who keeps chasing cases all the way to Beverly Hills, Cop III is one big yawn and no yucks. Murphy and director John Landis, who previously teamed on the much better Trading Places and the marginally better Coming to America, huff and puff here, but the end result isn't worth the effort.
It certainly can't have been the Baretta-on-a-bad-day script that attracted them with its cardboard villians ("Wax that clown," one of them instructs his gunmen) and its boys-and-their-toys car chases and gunfights. Other than the sight early on of two fatso mechanics lip-synching and boogying to Diana Ross and the Supremes' "Come See About Me" and Bronson Pinchot reprising his Serge role from Cop I, there is not an honest laugh to be had. Murphy mugs instead of acting, and the rest of the cast does the minimum, as if they knew ahead of time there was no chance they would be writing Oscar acceptance speeches for this one.
Sorry to say, but if Murphy doesn't do a decent movie or stretch himself with a truly adult part soon, he is going to find himself as washed up a screen relic as Chevy Chase. The Hollywood powers may continue to pay these two former funny men millions to star in pathetic comedies, but as Chase's recent bomb Cops and Robbersons vividly demonstrates, the customers won't automatically keep coming. (Note for film buffs: It doesn't help the movie, but directors Martha Coolidge, Joe Dante, George Lucas, Peter Medak, Arthur Hiller, Barbet Schroeder and John Singleton all have cameos.) (R)
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Tom Gliatto,
- Leah Rozen.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
