The consuming ambition of this movie, whatever else it might be up to, is to pass off Eddie Murphy as a black Clint Eastwood. The Dirty Harry series comes first to mind, propelled there by the plainclothesman's independent ways, his catastrophic results, and his snippiness to his superiors in the aftermath. But the personal vendetta that sends him (on vacation, and against explicit orders) to Beverly Hills -- him, that is, and his battered Chevy Nova, his duffel bag, and his limited wardrobe of T-shirts, sweatshirts, nothing with a collar -- raises the faint specter of Coogan's Bluff: the one with the Western sheriff in the New York jungle. And among the staff of the Beverly Palms Hotel, the membership of a private men's club, the espresso-sipping art-gallery crowd, and most especially the etiquette-conscious L.A.P.D., Murphy finds plenty of straight men (or straw men) to play against. But unlike Eastwood as Coogan, perhaps a little more like him as Harry, Murphy does not deign to play a character. His function in the movie as an editorialist of sorts (as a man, for example, who must make a great show of doubling over at the waist and clutching his side with hilarity when two pedestrians in space-man fashions pass him on the sidewalk) gives him a direct line to the audience; and the message sent out is genuinely populist, maybe even slobbist. But it would be a mistake to credit any anti-snobbism to a man and a movie merely replacing one sort of snobbism with another. Judge Reinhold, Lisa Eilbacher, Ronny Cox; directed by Martin Brest. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd