The greatest ’80s action film of 1991

Every old fart knows the ’80s were the golden era of the big, stupid action movie. As for exactly which of the many bloated, gloriously moronic ’80s action movies was the ultimate ’80s action movie—well, I’m sure no one agrees on that. Cases can be made for everything from Commando to Die Hard to Bloodsport. For my money, though, the ultimate big dumb ’80s action movie might be the awesomely boneheaded The Taking of Beverly Hills. It’s not the biggest ’80s action movie, and certainly not the best or best known. And in fact, it wasn’t made in the ’80s at all, but came out in that transitional year of 1991, when we had put away our parachute pants but still hadn’t forsaken our billowy Chess King shirts. Despite the production date, however, no other action film contains such a perfect and complete distillation of the ’80s attitude as The Taking of Beverly Hills, a movie about a bunch of spoiled millionaires who are taken advantage of by a slightly meaner millionaire until another millionaire steps up to the plate to blow stuff up. Even the music, which is dripping with synths and saxophones, is quintessentially ’80s. The Taking of Beverly Hills is like, “What if Wall Street was Die Hard?!?”

Ken Wahl—who started off with a promising serious career but is better known around these parts because he once shot an uzi at Klaus Kinski while pulling sweet 360s on the ski slopes and listening to Tangerine Dream in the movie The Soldier—stars as superstar quarterback Boomer Hayes. He’s kind of a lunkhead, though I believe we’re supposed to think he’s smarter and more sensitive than the average football player, a character trait communicated by having him trade charity guest appearances for sex. Wahl, looking beefier than he did just a few years earlier, never really made it to the upper echelon, or even the second tier for that matter, of action stars, though it’s not necessarily any fault of his. The second tier was occupied by Steven Segal and Jean Claude Van Damme, and those egos took up a lot of space.

Boomer and his mullet (there was a law at the time that every quarterback, real or fictional, had to sport a mullet) are making an appearance at a posh Beverly Hills charity event also being attended by smug millionaire Robert Masterson (Robert Davi, who has played a smug criminal in every single role he’s ever had). Masterson is the usual “money can’t buy you class” asshole these movies love, so all the people who were born into money can tsk-tsk the uncouthness of the guy who actually earned his millions. Boomer also meets harried cop Ed Kelvin (Max Headroom’s Matt Frewer), who provides us with the movie’s lesson about how all the people who work in Beverly Hills can’t afford to live there; and heiress Laura Sage (Harley Jane Kozak), with whom he will engage in the aforementioned sex-for-donations transaction—and you probably assumed that was going to be between Boomer and Matt Frewer!

Boomer and Laura retire to his mansion to cavort in a bubble bath, where they don’t have to see or hear about poor people. Surprisingly, it’s Boomer who does most of the sexy writhing in the bath. Score one for equality, but only if you think “sexy writhing” includes flailing your feet around and sculpting yourself a sweet wizard beard out of bubbles. Meanwhile, Officer Kelvin runs across a careening tanker truck that crashes and spills toxic chemicals. A state of emergency is called, and Beverly Hills is evacuated of all its residents—except for Boomer, who was too busy making bubble beards to hear all the sirens or the sounds of his bedmate shouting downstairs and being escorted away by the cops. Then comes the kicker: there is no toxic spill!

The entire thing was a ruse orchestrated by a gang of bitter ex-cops who were sick of watching over a bunch of self-centered Beverly Hills millionaires and so have now decided to rob the neighborhood blind. Of course, they didn’t count on that most classic of action movie evil-scheme monkey wrenches: a righteous football player.

Before too long, Boomer has stumbled onto the plot, and in about the same amount of time, Ed Kelvin discovers that his fellow conspirators aren’t as hesitant to shoot innocents in the head as he is. This leads to the confused cop teaming up with the quarterback to put an end to the madness. Neither of them are particularly good at being action heroes. Kelvin is too distraught over a combination of having had a part in the plan, trying to extricate himself from the madness, and worrying about the fact that even if he survives, he’s doing time. Boomer is a football god, but unlike most movies where being a football player equips you with the skills and technical knowledge of a Navy SEAL, it’s obvious he’s in way over his head. As the two alternately try to escape from Beverly Hills and foil the robbery, a lot of windows get broken and a lot of stuff blows up. There will also be more tortured football analogies than you could possibly imagine, and at one point Ken Wahl fights a SWAT tank!

Then he gets a bag of ninja throwing stars.

Much of The Taking of Beverly Hills is dumb as a brick, but at the same time, some of it is kind of clever. The heist is pretty well thought out if implausible, but it’s only implausible in the real world. In the world of action cinema, it’s a perfectly reasonable scheme. Because Beverly Hills is to Los Angeles what The Vatican is to Rome (a city within a city), it’s the perfect place for the robbery. The police department, electrical grid, and phone system are self-contained. Many of the action movies of the ’80s and early ’90s could be summarized as “Die Hard in a…”.The Taking of Beverly Hills is “Die Hard in a city,” before Die Hard With a Vengeance was “Die Hard in a city.” Even if it’s just a Die Hard clone (complete with a ridiculously convoluted scheme meant to cover a different, even more convoluted scheme) the movie moves along at a quick pace and manages to be, if not actually clever, then at the very least breezily enjoyable.

Director Sydney J. Furie was an accomplished director with a couple classics (including the Michael Caine spy thriller The IPCRESS File) and a couple not-quite classics (the strange Vietnam war soccer movie The Boys in Company C) under his belt, as well as more than a few goofy ’80s action films (including Iron Eagle) and one certifiable abomination (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace), though blame for that pile is squarely on the shoulders of the Cannon Film Group. For The Taking of Beverly Hills, Furie brought with him his long-time screenwriting collaborator Rick Natkin, who brought with him his sometimes collaborator, David Fuller. You wouldn’t think a movie as mindlessly silly and entertaining as this would need three writers, and you’d be right. It actually had four writers. Somehow, TV writer David J. Burke was thrown into the mix as well.

Usually, the more writers you have on a film, the worse it gets, but this team somehow managed to click. They keep the plot relatively lean and fast-moving. You have to forgive certain aspects of the film, mind you, chief among them being that the story never really gives us any reason to like Boomer all that much. He’s a rich football player who trades charity appearances for sex, but I guess in the roll call of football player crimes, the fact that the sex he solicits is at least consensual elevates him above some. Still, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the snotty millionaires getting robbed of things that are insured anyway, especially when it turns out that the whole scheme has actually been orchestrated by Robert Davi—no spoiler; it’s fucking Robert Davi! Did you think he was going to be a good guy? His plan within a plan is to bankrupt Laura’s father, who happens to be CEO of the insurance company most of Beverly Hills uses. The script has to have the cop gang senselessly killing people. Otherwise, as far as many people would be concerned, the crooks would be the good guys.

Ultimately, Boomer succeeds as an action hero because Ken Wahl. He seems perpetually confused, and “perpetually confused” is the exact state of mind a guy like him should be in when caught up in the middle of such an ludicrous criminal scheme. Plus, Boomer copies the one thing from Die Hard that many clones forget: he’s wounded. When the movie begins, Boomer has been hobbled by a knee injury, and for most of the movie, he’s plagued by the injury. It keeps him from being the unstoppable killing machine such films too often rely on. He also doesn’t know much about guns, and much of his success in fighting the gang of cops comes from luck, knowing the lay of the land, and help from his reluctant sidekick, Officer Kelvin. Speaking of which, I have to say that although I like Matt Frewer, he’s pretty annoying in this. The script’s one misstep is mistaking “whiny and annoying” for comic relief. It is, of course, not the first script to do that, nor would it be the last.

There’s very little to say about the rest of the cast. Former Fear frontman turned occasional actor Lee Ving (Streets of Fire) is wasted. Davi is also somewhat under-exploited. We know he can be a lot smarmier than he’s allowed to be here. Most of the cops are there to stand around at roadblocks or jump backwards into swimming pools after Ken Wahl throws something at them. The only supporting character of note is Branscombe Richmond, whose real name sounds like he should be one of the millionaires in this movie. Richmond is “best known” for his recurring roll as Bobby Sixkiller, Lorenzo Lamas’ buddy in Renegade, but he pops up in all sorts of the more outrageous action films, including Commando, Showdown in Little Tokyo, and Never Too Young to Die. In The Taking of Beverly Hills, he’s hooting and hollering and gunning people down and tearing around (and through) Beverly Hills in a SWAT assault vehicle.

Buried somewhere beneath all the exploding and things being thrown (although there are guns everywhere, Boomer is a QB, so naturally he prefers throwing things at people) there might be the hint that The Taking of Beverly Hills is playing itself as a straight-faced satire of the genre. By 1991, ’80s action films were pretty self-aware (not that they hadn’t always been a largely tongue-in-cheek genre), so playing one for laughs without drawing attention to the fact really wouldn’t have resulted in a movie substantially different from one that wasn’t satire.

Whatever the case, critics and audiences were unkind to The Taking of Beverly Hills. It was pretty roundly savaged by reviewers and didn’t make a splash with viewers. There had apparently been some hope that it would be a hit; they even made a video game tie-in! Too bad it didn’t pan out. I enjoyed the hell out of The Taking of Beverly Hills. It is phenomenally dumb and ridiculous but in a very enjoyable way. There’s massive amounts of (relatively bloodless) carnage, the wanton destruction of lots of luxury items, an enjoyable cast, Molotov cocktails made out of expensive brandy and crystal decanters, flamethrowers, actual explosions, a quick pace, a lot of laughs, and ninja stars! It might even be a forgotten classic of the genre.