Beverly Hills Cop III: (Nile Rodgers) Few of the
creative minds behind the
Beverly Hills Cop franchise wanted to
make a second sequel after 1987's follow-up to the original, monumental
1984 hit. Even star Eddie Murphy confessed that only a massive paycheck
would lure him back to the concept, and through Paramount's insistence
and a $15 million payday, 1994's
Beverly Hills Cop III became an
unlikely reality. The filmmakers and crew that had made the first two
films a success all dropped out of the project, leaving comedy director
John Landis at the helm with a different view of how the world of Axel
Foley should proceed. The Detroit detective is once again lured from
Detroit to Beverly Hills for an investigation into increasingly bizarre
villains and their crime rings. In this case, the target organization
occupies an amusement park, and most of the film was shot in Santa
Clara's Great America (then a Paramount-owned property playing the songs
from
Top Gun incessantly) as Murphy and his doubles have to run
about saving innocent civilians, sometimes in a mascot suit, while
foiling the underground counterfeit money operation. The film was
lambasted and performed more poorly than its predecessors, officially
killing the franchise until a revival in the 2020's. The functional
problem with the picture was Murphy's totally unenthusiastic
performance, which simply wasn't funny, and Landis' forcing of the buddy
cop concept further into the domain of ridiculously dumb comedy tropes.
The music by Harold Faltermeyer for the franchise had been immensely
popular, but he declined to return to the third film as well, leaving
Landis with the decision to reprise his collaboration with Nile Rodgers
from
Coming to America. Rodgers has always been best known for
his songwriting and production capabilities for top-line artists, but he
did start sprinkling film scores into his career in the 1980's and
beyond. Some of his orchestral writing is actually quite good, the best
moments of
Coming to America revealed during its occasional
instrumental expositions of grandeur. While Landis sought this sound
from Rodgers, he also clearly had his collaborations with Elmer
Bernstein in mind, because Rodgers wrote plenty of material that was
openly inspired by Bernstein in his 1980's comedy mode.
As Rodgers argued to Landis, however,
Beverly Hills Cop
III could not exist without at least some of Faltermeyer's theme and
its original synthetic pop personality, which left this score as
something of a bastardized orchestral evolution of the 1980's
Faltermeyer synth personality. For most listeners, this move just didn't
work. There's something about hearing the "Axel F" suite of themes
performed by an orchestra without adequate synthetic backing that
doesn't sound right, especially when the ensemble sounds dainty in the
depth of its mix. Parts of this score will make some listeners shake
their heads in confusion, but if you can bypass that initial shock of
the change in instrumental tone, there's actually some quite good
orchestral writing involved. The thought by everyone involved was that
Foley had matured away from the wise-cracking persona for which
Faltermeyer's music was suited and that the character had "earned" his
orchestral action mode. That strategy doesn't work, and perhaps it's
fitting that there is less than half an hour of score that actually made
it into the picture. The assignment was one that required immense
patience from Rodgers, who ended up re-writing cues many times to
appease a nervous studio that squarely disagreed with Landis about the
orchestral direction of the score and demanded changes to take the tone
further back towards the Faltermeyer establishment. In the end, the
admirable failure of a score for
Beverly Hills Cop III suffers
from a serious personality disorder because of this totally undecided
tone and style due to Landis. (Interestingly, even the song compilation
soundtrack was a major statistical failure in the charts and sales.)
Part of the big problem with this soundtrack was Landis' decision to
hire famed brothers Robert Sherman and Richard Sherman to write the
theme song for the WonderWorld theme park with the specific instruction
that they were to conjure the most annoying imitation of the Disney song
"It's a Small World" that they possibly could, with the intent to make
it obnoxious as a point of comedy. They dove into that assignment with
enthusiastic zeal, and using the help of arrangements and orchestration
from Louis Fagenson, the resulting children's theme accomplishes its
task well, adapted along with traditional circus and carnival tunes into
twenty minutes of purposefully mind-numbing material for the park
setting.
The Sherman Brothers' theme for WonderWorld is strictly
traditional in its renderings throughout the score, from straight
orchestral to marching band and calliope renditions of increasingly
maddening personality as the film progresses. It has almost nothing in
common with the tone of Rodgers' hybrid score by intent, but the
soundtrack suffers significantly as a result. The Sherman theme does
experience two notable adaptations into the score as the park is
introduced and again in the finale, but the intentional discord between
its insipidly happy personality and the rest of the score creates the
"fish out of water" humor that Landis wanted. For Rodgers' part, he
attempts to modernize the Faltermeyer synthetics but manages to lose the
resonance of the original renderings along the way. The soundscape is
shallower in these performances, and hand-clapping effects cheapen the
main reprise of the suite in "Axel F (Version 1)," as do the calliope
tones during the comedy motif in the sequence. (This was the only score
track to make it onto the song compilation album.) He does resort back
to straight synthetics when forced to by the studio, "Axel Saves the
Kids (Version 3)" sounding awkward as a result because of Rodgers'
difficulty stating straight Faltermeyer-inspired action in any way that
matches the rest of the score. (At least it's not as grating as the even
worse, hideously manipulated rendition in "Version 2.") More fascinating
is his fully orchestral mode. A hyperactive timpani player makes for the
single most important instrument in the score, oddly, seemingly
omnipresent as a rhythm setter rather than a drum kit or rambling
bassline. The composer's singular action is sometimes quite engaging and
powerful, that pounding timpani and ambitious string and brass lines in
"Chop Shop Raid" surprisingly good. The same mode continues in "Raid on
Truck" with almost Jerry Goldsmith
First Blood-level force of
will. A lighter version of this material with carnival snare occupies
"Secret Room," and the sound is less refined in the largely unused
"Chase Through Park" and restrained to John Barry-like tension in "Fool
Named Axel/Sanderson Dies." The endless rewrites of the incongruous
"Axel Saves the Kids" cue reveal that Rodgers had originally channeled
Bernard Herrmann for the Ferris wheel rescue scene, with outstanding
flourishes of swirling sensationalism that at times took the personality
of Mark McKenzie's later writing. (McKenzie was an orchestrator on this
project.)
What many listeners will care the most about in
Beverly Hills Cop III is its thematic consistency with the
franchise, however, and Rodgers was a loyal advocate of the "Axel F"
theme and all its various sequences. He adapts it really intelligently,
and though the renderings are rather shallow at times due to the
recording size and quality, his treatment of the idea is often apt. Once
again, the "Axel F" theme consists of the main melody, its deep
bassline, the buddy cop secondary sequence, and the comedy motif
interlude otherwise termed the banana theme by Faltermeyer. The main
melody is heard immediately in "Axel F (Version 1)" on rather
cheap-sounding synths and cycled regularly in the cue. It returns to
familiar keyboarding with aggressive loops at 0:11 into "Back to Beverly
Hills" for its formal reintroduction in the narrative. From there, the
idea is manipulated for comedy, reduced to woodwind, tuba, and plucked
string humor in "Axel Okey Dokey" and moving into outright funny,
boisterous, and fully orchestral Bernstein laughs and western style in
"Axel in Mirror." The melody is translated into a James Bond-like
suspense device of Barry heritage in "Axel & Dave/Axel, Ellis & Dave,"
where it's really nicely adapted in its phrasing to emphasize its more
ominous minor mode capabilities. This material is easily the most
interesting and enjoyable in the score, with an abundance of Goldsmith
action style in the brass. Such adaptation by Rodgers continues with
more staggered emphasis along the same lines in "Not the First Time" and
persists throughout "Axel Out of Bullets" similarly. Finally, the main
theme is unleashed at 0:18 into "Axel Fox" for an orchestral and
synthetic blend for the character's sendoff. Typically paired with the
melody is its underlying bassline, which isn't ever as powerful as
Faltermeyer's synthesizers make it in the first two scores. Faithful at
0:16 into "Axel F (Version 1)" with some of the same familiar thumping
resonance, this motif logically recurs at 0:27 into "Back to Beverly
Hills" but with the silly clapping effects accentuated. It contributes
to the flamboyant Bernstein comedy in "Axel in Mirror" and is ported
into a rambunctious symphonic variant in "Axel & Dave/Axel, Ellis &
Dave" before continuing that same line into "Not the First Time" and
through "Axel Out of Bullets." If one aspect of the theme can be
considered the most diminished in this score, it's this bassline, an
unfortunate loss that contributes to the relative lack of perceived
coolness in the recording.
The chipper buddy cop portion of the main Faltermeyer
theme is heard at 0:47 into "Axel F (Version 1)" on its usual staccato
keyboarding but is swallowed up in the mix. Returning at 1:00 into "Back
to Beverly Hills" in almost identical form, it proceeds on enthusiastic
trumpets at 0:36 and 1:08 into "Not the First Time" as an interlude to
action, reprised much the same in "Axel Out of Bullets" and at 0:33 into
"Axel Fox." The comedy/banana theme revisits its marimba tones at 1:42
into "Axel F (Version 1)" and returns with tuba-blurting humor at 0:41
into "Axel Fox" to close the score. As for the new themes, the Sherman
WonderWorld theme is introduced with a blazing, full-ensemble fanfare in
"Welcome to Wonderworld" and reprised briefly at the outset of "Axel
Fox," but its bevy of source recordings include the most significant,
prime performance with banjo in "Wonderful Wonderworld (Instrumental),"
its maddening synthetic carnival tone laced with cute sound effects. The
insufferable marching band version in "Wonderworld Marching Band" leads
to a fuller, redundant ensemble take in "Wonderful Wonderworld #1
(Orchestral Version)" and a purely synthetic calliope farce in
"Wonderworld Calliope" that is as expected and again for "Wonderworld
Calliope - Waltz Version." There is a minimal villain motif unique to
this score, using several identical notes in heightened anticipation and
then one ascending chord shift. It begins to develop at 0:21 into "Chop
Shop Raid" and becomes most prominent at 0:41, shifting to a brief
moment of nice suspense in "Your Cooperation" that went unused. It's
also set against ascending comedy antics for faux worry in "Axel Changes
Matrix." Aside from that, there's really nothing new to appreciate,
leaving the unique source writing as frequent distractions. The
pop-infused, nearly comedic action in "Annihilator 2000" was dated even
at the time, and a pseudo-love theme in "Janice Falls in Love" utilizes
generic keyboarded and guitar material. On the orchestral side, the
"Prehistoric Ride" cues are amusingly reminiscent again of McKenzie
comedy of the era. The score was never released up front, and it took
until 2025 before La-La Land Records provided a full, limited album
containing the short Rodgers score, the Sherman Brothers material's
source variants, and a slew of alternate takes and demos, the last of
which not all that interesting. Of the alternates, "Axel F (Version 3
With Horns)" takes the main Faltermeyer suite and adds cheap brass hits,
but the Herrmann-inspired, orchestral "Axel Saves the Kids" versions are
clear highlights. The album is a comprehensive look at a total strategic
failure of a soundtrack, but those familiar with Rodgers' orchestral
chops will appreciate his best attempt to follow orders.
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The insert includes detailed information about the score and film.
