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I noted, to my surprise, that I had seen all 16 of his theatrical full-length features (beginning with 1983’s The Hunger on through to 2010’s Unstoppable), half of them in the theater, but many of them only once, a fact I am rectifying by revisiting those in weeks to come. To date, I have viewed The Hunger and The Last Boy Scout. I believe that film, True Romance, and Crimson Tide together represent a streak of bravura commercial American filmmaking from the last 30 years. As the latter two are often heralded as his greatest achievements, the inclusion of the former may cause some perplexity. For comparison’s sake, I want to briefly delve into it before turning to Beverly Hills Cop II.

It had been about 20 years since I had seen The Last Boy Scout, but it played out like it had been only yesterday, while the level of outrageous, escalating violence still managed to sucker punch my gut. Out of the three directors who filmed screenwriter Shane Black’s archetypal satirical gonzo buddy comedy action demolition spectaculars of the ‘80s and ‘90s (Richard Donner for Lethal Weapon and Renny Harlin for The Long Kiss Goodnight were the others), Scott may have been the most apt pairing.

Underneath the explosions, mayhem and car chases is a fairly faithful updating of the existential private eye figure from 1970s American cinema (chiefly Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye and Harry Moseby from Night Moves) mashed up with the popular one black/one white buddy cop movie genre that was then in vogue. Scott’s affinity for the bruised loner suffuses the project with an unexpected gravitas that allows the movie’s most emotionally potent moment - a monologue by Damon Wayans’ character on the loss of his wife and child and his fucked-up life in the aftermath. Coming at just about the midway mark in the film, it is a sequence whose stillness is marked even more by the almost wall-to-wall action on either side.

Bruce Willis was never more disheveled (while still sporting a full head of hair) than as disgraced Secret Service agent turned low rent private dick Joe Hallenbeck, whose signature moments are fishing someone else’s still smoldering cigarette out of the gutter to save on buying a new pack, and punching a hood so hard in the nose it drops him dead on the spot. As he wends his way through a convoluted plot involving blackmail, political corruption, and an attempt to legalize sports gambling, he picks up an unwanted sidekick, a disgraced quarterback (Wayans) whose girlfriend has been murdered, attempts to resolve issues of marital infidelity with his wife and connect with his mouthy and emotionally distant daughter, and tangles with a seemingly endless menagerie of chatty, homicidally inclined henchman - wonderfully embodied by the likes of Badja Djola, Kim Coates and Taylor Negron, the latter channeling Martin Landau’s character from North by Northwest - who wind up stabbed, shot, set on fire, exploded and stabbed/shot/eviscerated by helicopter blades.

There is no top that isn’t eventually gone over. My favorite shot is a perfectly framed moment of an upside down car crash landing into an aghast mansion dweller’s pool. It’s the excess of the entire film distilled into three seconds. Elsewhere, the opening credits sequence - a slick production video for “Friday Night’s a Great Time for Football” sung by Bill Medley (from The Righteous Brothers) is filled with enough patriotic jingo to qualify as a lost image from the Parallax Corporation’s assassin screening test. It’s so effectively blunt in aping the real thing that its comic and satirical nuances may not be fully appreciated.

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