Last summer's The Nutty Professor was the blockbuster hit he needed, and now Eddie Murphy has gone back to making the sort of post-Beverly Hills Cop cookie-cutter cop-buddy claptrap that helped derail his career in the first place. Not that Metro isn't entertaining in its junky, mechanical way: There's some comfort in watching a movie in which you know exactly who's about to be murdered and who's about to be kidnapped and terrorized five to ten minutes before those respective scenes take place. (There's also a car-chase scene—in San Francisco!) And it's comfortably familiar when Murphy's grief-stricken cop ignores orders that he be taken off a case because he's too close to the victim: That old bit was an oft-parodied cliche back when Murphy was shitting out these movies in 1988. It never aspires to be high art—even the title is meaningless—but Metro is too lazily assembled, and too stingy with the jokes, to even live up to its modest ambitions.