‘The Taking of Beverly Hills’ (R)

"The Taking of Beverly Hills" is sound and Furie signifying nothing. Director Sydney J. Furie takes a promising premise -- the robbery of the world's most upscale community while residents are fleeing a fake toxic spill -- and reduces it to an assortment of car stunts. Cars screech, cars crash, cars flip, cars burn, and so on. Take that away and you have Ken "Wiseguy" Wahl. You'll miss the cars.

Wahl plays football star "Boomer" Hayes, overlooked in the evacuation, who reluctantly slips into a "Die Hard" mode and ends up in dull combat with Bat Masterson, played by Robert Davi as a Gordon Gekko-style market baron who decides to add the word "robber" to his job description. Somewhere in the middle: Harley Jane Kozak plays a tycoon's daughter who is the object of Davi's long-term affection and Wahl's short one.

After a lame establishing sequence shot in the real Beverly Hills -- outdoor shots of its magnificent estates, tony stores and expensive cars -- the action shifts to a stunt-double city (an uncompleted sports facility in Mexico City). With the skimpiest of plot explanations, the film jump-starts into action with the late-night crash of the toxic waste truck, the evacuation of sleepy citizens and the pre-plotted plundering of their homes and businesses, tabulated by tens of millions on a computer that seems to be the real boss.

All of this is preposterous, of course, and the whole thing plays more like a made-for-television movie than a true feature. It certainly has none of the pop culture panache or testosterone-driven energy of "Die Hard," with which it shares many plot conveniences.

And Wahl is no Bruce Willis, faint damning though that may be. He's neither funny nor convincing, and looks merely exposed on a big screen. Matt Frewer plays a soured cop turned good buddy as if he wishes he were still in "Max Headroom." Kozak hasn't seen enough Lauren Bacall films to carry off her impersonation, and even the normally revile-able Davi is deadly dull as the bad billionaire. Then again, it's obvious that Furie saved his directing energies for all those car sequences. All in all, this is a caper film gone crapper.

"The Taking of Beverly Hills" is rated R, but deserves a Zzzzzzzzz.