The Taking Of Beverly Hills

The Taking of Beverly Hills (1991)

Runtime: 96 minutes

Directed by: Sidney J. Furie

Starring: Ken Wahl, Matt Frewer, Harley Jane Kozak, Robert Davi, Lee Ving

From: Nelson Entertainment

This is a goofy as heck action movie that I saw once before, albeit more than 20 years ago. Should it be a surprise that I barely remembered the movie? It's not great but it's not awful either. I mean, besides what I said below, it also has a wacky early 90's soundtrack... everything from an odd Jan Hammer score to random songs popular at the time, such as EMF's Unbelievable and Faith No More's Epic:

This is a random watch, but I actually did see this film once before; however, that was more than 20 years ago so I really remembered nothing about it. I figured it was time to see a dopey action movie, and dopey this is. I mean, it's about a fake chemical spill (if a tanker truck says “toxic chemicals” on the side in big red letters, it's probably not legit) in Beverly Hills that is done by corrupt ex-cops in order to rob all the rich A-holes who live there and the ones to try and stop this are a bad cop turned good (Matt Frewer!) and a professional football quarterback named Boomer Hayes (Ken Wahl, w/ spectacular mullet). It's a high-concept sort of thing and not much more. And of course it's simply preposterous to think that cops or former cops in the Los Angeles area would be unscrupulous...

To be honest here, the movie is really stupid; you don't want to think about the plot too much. Don't even ask how all of the real cops are disposed of... although it's uncomfortably close to the stupid way the cops are dealt with in The Dark Knight Rises! Also, the cops (past and present) in the area wouldn't know who the quarterback for the pro football team is, especially if he has a distinctive nickname like Boomer? Some of the attempted humor is really bad. Yet I can't hate this goofy piece of crap.

I mean, there's plenty of explosions, a SWAT team tank destroying buildings, a flamethrower, homemade Molotov cocktails, random Ninja stars, opportunities shoehorned in for the quarterback to toss random objects, and a nice lineup of familiar faces, at least to me: Harley Jane Kozak, Robert Davi (shock of shocks, he was a villain), Branscombe Richmond, Lee Ving, George Wyner, and even Meat from Porky's. It's lame and does not rise about its concept but if you dig the low budget action movies of the past, there definitely are plenty of worse options to go with than this one.