48 hrs. Two enemies, one shot, zero chill.
48 hrs is all they’ve got to catch 2 killers. Unfortunately, they can’t stand each other. One’s a cop with a temper and bad fashion sense, the other’s a con with a mouth and in need of sex. Together these two are pure chaos.
48 Hrs.” — A Wild Ride Through Crime, Comedy, and Chaos
OK ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, trans men and trans women, plus the non-binary option. You need to hold onto your heads and keep your man bun hair clip handy, ’cause we’re rollercoastering into the 1982 buddy-cop blockbuster before “buddy-cop” was even a genre. It’s the movie, 48 Hrs.! Set in San Francisco before human poop lined all the streets, it still managed to avoid being a typical Sunday afternoon stroll. No… No… No.. This is two days of madness, mayhem, and machine guns with extra hot sauce.
Directed by Walter Hill. For this movie, he was the guy who took a film camera and asked the studio executives, “What if we made Clint Eastwood run a marathon of testosterone?” A movie legend was made that day and 48 Hrs. is what you get when stick a cop and a criminal in a blender and hit “frappe.” This is Eddie Murphy in his silver screen debut, and oh baby, the man does not just dip his toe in the water. It’s his big chance and he cannonballs into the Hollywood pool wearing a prison clothes and singing The Police.
Nick Nolte is Jack Cates.
He’s a gruff, gravel-throated detective who looks like he eats broken glass for breakfast and washes it down with Jack Daniels. He’s a walking hangover with a badge, and he’s trying to catch a pair of psycho criminals who make Charles Manson look a Care Bear. Normally he’s the man to get the job done but this time he needs help from a slick-talking criminal named Reggie Hammond. Eddie Murphy enters the stage left with a laugh, a presence that has you forget that you’re watching a cop movie and think you’re watching stand-up at the Apollo.
There’s just one problem, they’ve only got 48 hours to catch the bad guys. Yup, two days…. Just one weekend. That’s almost less time than it takes for Trump to destroy the stock market and these guys are chasing murderers, dodging bullets, and learning to love each other.
It’s a classic toxic masculinity bromance !
48 hrs is all about grit, balls, and glorious one-liners. It’s so hardcore ‘80s that you can still smell the Aqua Net and hear the synthesizers. And Eddie Murphy is the cherry on top. He’s the Cindy Lauper in the Madonna martini bar. He didn’t just steal the scenes but instead mugged the entire movie and rode off on a laugh.
But beneath the wisecracks and gunfights, 48 Hrs. kicked off a whole genre. It’s the original mismatched duo, forced to work together, each one rubbing off on the other like sandpaper. There would probably never have been a Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour, or Bad Boys franchise, without Cates and Hammond trail blazing the way.
So if you haven’t 48 hrs, grab some popcorn and take a ride in a beat-up car with a lunatic at the wheel with a con man riding shotgun. 48 Hrs. isn’t just a movie. Is early-’80s madness and baby, it’s fucking awesome
Here’s some late ’80s Robocop insanity
