Leo Nova and Earl Skinner attack a drug plant behind a Los Angeles Chinese storefront run by Tito Delgadillo. They steal Fatal Beauty drug packets. They don't realize that a mistake has left the packages with lethal doses. Narcotic officer Rita Rizzoli (Whoopi Goldberg) has been pursuing Delgadillo and is assigned the case. She finds Delgadillo's dead body and links the case to wealthy businessman Conrad Kroll. Mike Marshak (Sam Elliott) is Kroll's unwitting head of security. The drug starts killing its users or making them psychotic.

This is one of those 80s/90s harden cop dramas. It's Beverly Hills Cop or Lethal Weapon without the humor. There are a few bothersome issues. It's a lot brutal violence but some of it doesn't make the best sense. Rizzoli is Italian which Whoopi struggles to fit. The most glaring is the title which refers to the drug. Without that knowledge, it seems to refer to Whoopi. It makes it sound like a sexy femme fatale which runs counter to Whoopi. Also Whoopi and Sam Elliott struggle to develop romantic chemistry. There are lots of little flaws which makes this less than compelling.

While this is listed as a comedy action film, it is closer to an action film with comic moments, particularly the cat fight she gets into with Jennifer Warren, the nasty upscale mother of the drug addicted James Le Gros, a teenager whom she initially is threatened by due to the arrest of his druglord father. He then comes back to her when 10 of his friends are killed by tainted street drugs. Whoopi's an undercover cop on the vice squad who becomes personally involved through her determination to clean the streets up from the low lives knowingly selling tainted drugs. She initially despises bodyguard Sam Elliot who works for one of the drug lords she's trying to bring down but he proves himself to being a decent guy and offers to help.

Known for her colorful wigs while under cover, Goldberg is tough but decent, a hard fighter and downright beaten when she learns about kids dying as a result of the tainted drugs. Earlier it's revealed how the tainted drugs ended up on the street, put together by a kid too high to know what he was doing, yet sold on the streets anyway. The code Fatal Beauty indicates what is stamped on the packages and obviously it is fatal if certainly not beautiful.

This is not as good as "Jumping Jack Flash" (Whoopi's entrance into film comedy),but certainly much better than her predecessor to this, "Burglar", a dreadful action comedy. Thanks to its profound script, this becomes a thoughtful look at the low lives who have no interest in who they kill through the drugs they have sold on the street as long as they make a profit.

Whoopi has a scene with Elliot that almost sounds semi-autobiographical and the emotions she utilizes in that scene are obviously sincerely her own. Her initial confrontation with Warren (who always reminds me of Jane Fonda) is violent but funny, yet there's a follow-up between them that is truly touching. Add Whoopi to the comics who could make you laugh one moment and break your heart the next, and that is not fatal beauty. That's eternal beauty.

I do love what Whoopi Goldberg does with her character Rizzoli as an undercover narcotics cop. But the term Fatal Beauty is for a certain deadly designer drug that she is tracking down the source of. Nevertheless Whoopi proves to be quite fatal to any number of the characters in the film.

But this film suffers from a really muddled script and the distinct possibility that the several bad guys who want this shipment of this nasty Fatal Beauty stuff are imbibing a bit too much of it themselves. Whoopi's target is Harris Yulin a big New Orleans contractor who is deep in the narcotics trade unofficially. But Yulin himself has troubles in his own ranks.

Sam Elliott's character as Yulin's bodyguard and enforcer is also a mystery. I couldn't figure out what his function is as he keeps saving Goldberg.

Whoopi is fun to watch especially slugging it out with rich society woman Jennifer Warren. But the film is just too murky.