It's generated some classics and more than a few stinkers, but too many buddy-cop films are simply boring
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*2 Guns* shows that the cop buddy movie has flatlined. It only took 24 hours for the film to vanish from my mind – and I took notes. Yes, it's the umpteenth buddy-cop retread, where two wily but likable antagonists are forced to team up to fulfil their competing agendas. Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington play undercover operatives posing as drug traffickers in order to snag Edward James Olmos's Latin drug lord. Their chemistry and fast-talking effervescence are instantly appealing: Washington the swaggeringly confident dandy, and Wahlberg all nerves, jitters and querulousness.
But as usual, the problem is the formula, not the duo. Diverting as the banter is, there's no dodging the fact that Walter Hill's 48 Hrs has officially now been remade for the bazillionth time in 31 years. Back in 1982, 48 Hrs was an original, a meshing of elements from Two Rode Together, In The Heat Of The Night, Bustin' Loose and Thunderbolt And Lightfoot (the buddy thriller ne plus ultra), all kicked into another dimension by Hill's gift as a kinetic action director, trained by Peckinpah himself in the school of fountaining blood squibs. Added to that was the felicitous casting of a prematurely ragged Nick Nolte and an unknown Eddie Murphy, whose mutual racial antagonism seems shockingly forthright today (Nolte drops the N-Bomb a lot), facing off against a psychopathic young James Remar.
For old-school Hill fans, 48 Hrs was the last of a superb series of revisionist 70s genre pieces, such as Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, and the first indication of the rot that would blight his work in the 1980s. His Red Heat was essentially the same movie, while Another 48 Hrs, oddly, was not. Meanwhile, the tsunami of knock-offs began to build: Lethal Weapon, Stakeout, Bad Boys, the later Die Hards, Tango And Cash, Blue Streak, Chill Factor, Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon, Money Train… There were some keepers like Midnight Run, The Last Boy Scout and, recently, The Heat, all of them blessed with adroitly paired performers. If you were stuck with the formula, but lacked fireworks in the main casting – think Skeet Ulrich and Cuba Gooding in Chill Factor – you were sunk.
The buddy thriller, with its one plot, has long been a stabilser-wheels genre for cheap, presumed malleable, foreign directors such as 2 Guns' Baltasar Kormakur, from Iceland, who also made Wahlberg's negligible Contraband, or Chilean-Swede Daniel Espinosa, who made Denzel's buddy-ish Safe House. The stars and their acting coaches handle themselves, the pliable newcomer directs, but the Machine makes the movie, because the Machine has always made this movie, except for that first time, which now seems so poignantly long ago. Reported by guardian.co.uk 22 hours ago.
Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
*2 Guns* shows that the cop buddy movie has flatlined. It only took 24 hours for the film to vanish from my mind – and I took notes. Yes, it's the umpteenth buddy-cop retread, where two wily but likable antagonists are forced to team up to fulfil their competing agendas. Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington play undercover operatives posing as drug traffickers in order to snag Edward James Olmos's Latin drug lord. Their chemistry and fast-talking effervescence are instantly appealing: Washington the swaggeringly confident dandy, and Wahlberg all nerves, jitters and querulousness.
But as usual, the problem is the formula, not the duo. Diverting as the banter is, there's no dodging the fact that Walter Hill's 48 Hrs has officially now been remade for the bazillionth time in 31 years. Back in 1982, 48 Hrs was an original, a meshing of elements from Two Rode Together, In The Heat Of The Night, Bustin' Loose and Thunderbolt And Lightfoot (the buddy thriller ne plus ultra), all kicked into another dimension by Hill's gift as a kinetic action director, trained by Peckinpah himself in the school of fountaining blood squibs. Added to that was the felicitous casting of a prematurely ragged Nick Nolte and an unknown Eddie Murphy, whose mutual racial antagonism seems shockingly forthright today (Nolte drops the N-Bomb a lot), facing off against a psychopathic young James Remar.
For old-school Hill fans, 48 Hrs was the last of a superb series of revisionist 70s genre pieces, such as Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, and the first indication of the rot that would blight his work in the 1980s. His Red Heat was essentially the same movie, while Another 48 Hrs, oddly, was not. Meanwhile, the tsunami of knock-offs began to build: Lethal Weapon, Stakeout, Bad Boys, the later Die Hards, Tango And Cash, Blue Streak, Chill Factor, Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon, Money Train… There were some keepers like Midnight Run, The Last Boy Scout and, recently, The Heat, all of them blessed with adroitly paired performers. If you were stuck with the formula, but lacked fireworks in the main casting – think Skeet Ulrich and Cuba Gooding in Chill Factor – you were sunk.
The buddy thriller, with its one plot, has long been a stabilser-wheels genre for cheap, presumed malleable, foreign directors such as 2 Guns' Baltasar Kormakur, from Iceland, who also made Wahlberg's negligible Contraband, or Chilean-Swede Daniel Espinosa, who made Denzel's buddy-ish Safe House. The stars and their acting coaches handle themselves, the pliable newcomer directs, but the Machine makes the movie, because the Machine has always made this movie, except for that first time, which now seems so poignantly long ago. Reported by guardian.co.uk 22 hours ago.