48 Hrs. (1982) – Review

There are many things that set 48 Hrs. apart from the crowd. One is that it’s the film that shuffled the tropes of the buddy movie around in line before Lethal Weapon cemented them, another is that it’s the film that properly introduced the world to the dynamo of energy that was an unfeasibly young (only 19!) Eddie Murphy. Hell, you could even bring up the fact that it’s the other Joel Silver production that has steel drums feature predominantly on a James Horner soundtrack (the other being Commando, obviously) – but the most noticable thing about this legendarily hard bitten movie is that it’s arguably the successful example of Walter Hill making unpalatable lead characters guys you’d like to have a beer with.
While other directors have toyed with the concept of filling their movies with human beings that are all grade-A pieces of shit with the only thing separating our heroes being that they’re slightly less shitty than the guys they’re chasing, Hill routinely made it an art form and with 48. Hrs, he perfected this dubious art despite a near endless stream of racist, misanthropic rants.

After the type of violent, seat of your pants style of jail break you only got in 80s action movies, vicious career criminal Albert Ganz escapes from a chain gain with the help of his mountainous accomplice, Billy Bear. Heading back to San Francisco, they decide to drop in on a couple of old acquaintances with the intention of blowing them away in order to discover the location of a substantial pile of loot they’d all collectively robbed years prior.
Into the middle of this mission of malevolence stumbles SFPD Inspector Jack Cates, the sort of hard drinkin’, scruffy, missanthrope that gives hard drinkin’, scruffy missanthropes a bad name and his life of grumbling at his girlfriend and alienating his fellow officers gets all the more complicated after his service revolver is used to kill a couple of cops during a frenzied shootout. Jack handles with all the emotional maturity of a over-sized toddler with worrying blood/alcohol levels, but one lead remains available to tap if Jack ever wants to succeed at bringing down his quarry.
Enter Reggie Hammond, a fast talking, wise cracking former associate of Ganz’s who is 6 months shy of finishing up a three year sentence for armed robbery and if he agrees to help Jack catch (or more likely shoot to death) Ganz, then he’ll be let off the rest of his sentence. With only forty eight hours of jail release given to Reggie to accomplish this goal, both him and the obnoxiously gruff Jack have to find a way to stay on the same page if they’re ever going to both get what they want, but with both these guys having chips on their shoulders the size of surfboards, they’re more likely going to kill each other than put a bullet where it belongs – lodged in Ganz’s spinal column.

So, let’s address that large, sweary, politically incorrect elephant in the room right off the bat. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the work of Walter Hill will know that he loves placing you in the company of outspoken alpha males whose flawed personalities usually flare up in impressively anti-social behaviour and then have you cheer them on. In The Warriors, it was a violent gang of street punks, in Southern Comfort it was a malajusted group of national guardsmen and here it’s Nick Nolte on top, world hating form. Stomping around the place and growling his lines at everybody like someone shaved down a yeti and stuck a gun holster on him, Nolte plays the kind of shoot first, shoot second, maybe think of a question at some point and then shoot some more type of hard boiled cop we once believed were only the product of the movies and you can tell that the actor is utterly loving playing a booze soaked lawman whose bitterness is so acidic, I’m stunned he has any shine left on his police badge.
And then there’s Eddie Murphy’s star making turn as Reggie Hammond who, despite being an abrasive armed criminal who is introduced memorably murdering “Roxanne” by The Police, proves to be incredibly, equally and inexplicably fun to hang around with. The two on their own positively live these roles, but together, the pair have chemistry for days and it’s also the main reason why you should let 48 Hrs. get away with some of it’s more dated content.

Yes, the women in the film are mostly nagging girlfriends, whores, or nagging whores who are also girlfriends – but this isn’t a movie thats interested in sparing your feelings and while all buddy movies, even one as early as this, features that trope where the two leads hate each other at first, 48 Hrs. pushes it into amusingly shocking extremes. For some, watching Nolte’s hero constantly weaponize racial slurs in order to try to keep his charge in line will be utterly stunning, and rightly so and if it was directed at anyone else other than a nineteen year-old, ravenously hungry Eddie Murphy, it would be reprehensible. However, Murphy is a fucking dynamo that parrys and blocks every barb thrown his way only to counter the two in return. Not only that, but the scene where Hammond walks into and single-handedly shake down a racially charged, redneck bar armed with Jack’s badge not only reveals that this is a movie that’s willing to give as much as it takes, but you can actually see Murphy’s star ascending with every word that explodes from his mouth.
The plot mostly takes a back seat to the two stars swapping gasp-inducing insults with all the enthusiasm of a couple of kids swapping Pokémon cards, but the villains – played by James Remar and Sonny Landham with genuinely intimidating relish – are vile enough to make our two feuding “heroes” seem virtuous enough to be worth cheering. Bottom line, 48 Hrs. is a careening, freewheeling thrill ride that works precisely because our two champions are anti-social shit-heels and their eventual and inevitable bonding feels earned, even after some of the rawer comments that’s flown around previously.
The “of its time” accusations may stick to a certain degree, but the bullish talents of Murphy, Nolte and Hill are simply too damn good to ignore and even in this embryonic, foul-mouthed, unrepentantly toxic form, you can tell that the buddy cop movie stylings of 1974’s Freebie And The Bean are in good, if caustic hands.

Come for the vicious banter, stay for the unstoppable force that is an R-rated Eddie Murphy before endless PG kids movies dulled his edge and enjoy a movie that simply does not give a single shit about anything other than wanting to entertain.
What, you think Murphy is flipping the bird on the poster by accident?

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