MOVIE REVIEW : An Impoverished ‘Beverly Hills’

“The Taking of Beverly Hills” (which opened Friday citywide) has a jaw-dropping, mind-numbing, movie-killing doozy of a concept. It’s about a gang of crooks who try to loot Beverly Hills by staging a toxic-waste accident and fire, evacuating the entire community and then pillaging everything.

That’s the appeal of the film, if it can be said to have an appeal: a bunch of crazy bozos in uniform running around one of the world’s poshest neighborhoods for two hours, wrecking everything. Tanks plow through the mansions; boutiques blow up; the bank gets pulled apart. And, down in a cellar at Century City, two grinning accountants tote up the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of thievery on computers.

Meanwhile, only two men--a quarterback named Boomer (Ken Wahl) and a renegade crook-cop (Matt Frewer)--battle these hooligans: outracing the SWAT tank, hurtling around in a bullet-riddled $150,000 Rolls-Royce and hurling Molotov cocktails in Tiffany decanters at the bad guys.

How can rational human beings dream up such an entertainment? Consider the amount of disbelief we have to suspend. The entire Beverly Hills Police Force has been kidnaped or incapacitated; the Los Angeles Police Department itself is completely fooled by the fake Beverly Hills cops. Criminals masquerading as the Environmental Protection Agency stage the evacuation, with the real EPA puzzlingly out of touch. Most amazing, not a single news team, or TV crew, from anywhere in the world, bothers to come down and cover the story.

A scrap of social conscience skulks absurdly around the movie. There are moments where Boomer and his cop-buddy get in touch with their feelings, and there’s a candle-lit sunken bathtub tryst with the ridiculously rich heroine (Harley Jane Kozack).

It’s obvious that “The Taking of Beverly Hills” (rated R, for violence and language) couldn’t possibly have been a good movie. What’s more surprising is that it isn’t even a passably funny bad one. Director Sidney J. Furie, who co-wrote the original story and probably had some “Die Hard” fantasies when he started, doesn’t even get the sheer bawdy idiot fun of the unusual over-glamorous clinker; despite lots of forced humor, it’s played disconcertingly straight. Everything takes place on a dingy, murky evening and the Beverly Hills, or mock Beverly Hills, here, might as well have been re-created on a back lot in Wilmette. It probably would have been much more fun if it were.

‘The Taking of Beverly Hills’

Boomer: Ken Wahl

Elaine: Harley Jane Kozack

A Columbia Pictures release of a Nelson Entertainment presentation. Director Sidney J. Furie. Producer Graham Henderson. Executive producers Barry Spikings, Rick Finkelstein Screenplay by Rick Natkin, David Fuller, David J. Burke. Cinematographer Frank Johnson. Editor Anthony Gibbs. Music Jan Hammer. Production design Peter Lamont. With Matt Frewer, Robert Davi. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

MPAA-rated R