48 Hours

Nick Nolte's cranky and violent, Eddie Murphy's horny. That sums up the broad strokes of their characters. Nolte's also racist, I guess.

I'd never seen this before last weekend, so I didn't know anything about it beyond the two characters not liking each other. A killer named Ganz is on the loose, looking for a half a million dollars a few people, including Reggie (Murphy), stole from a drug deal. He kills a cop in the process of escaping Cates (Nolte) the first time, and did it with Cates' firearm, so the cop is kind of gung-ho about hunting him down. So he fudges some paperwork to slip Reggie out of prison for two days to try and track Ganz down.

Everything else is the two leads fighting with each other while trying to catch Ganz. Cates is a pretty lousy cop. Not just because he beats suspects, or because he repeatedly uses racial slurs towards Reggie. I mean, he just kind of sucks at catching criminals. Basically every advance they make in the case is because of Reggie. Which at least justifies Cates getting him out of prison six months early, but still makes Cates seem kind of useless otherwise.

Cates just seems like a jerk to everyone. There's a half-assed subplot with his girlfriend (played by Annette O'Toole), where she's frustrated by his inability to communicate as much as by how her work is going, but there's no resolution to that. Seems like it's in there to fill time. Even the other cops seem to hate his guts. I think we're meant to read it as professional jealousy, that Cates is so awesome he makes them look bad. But given how he does in this movie, it seems more like he's a guy who thinks he's way hotter stuff than he is. Eddie Murphy is, Eddie Murphy in the '80s. He's making smartass remarks constantly. Several of which are funny. Especially when he responds to Cates' attempts at insults. 

The one subtler bit I like is how sometimes Reggie doesn't fire back when Cates insults him. He doesn't get angry, he just kind of watches him silently for a moment. I don't know if it's meant to be Reggie just getting tired of the abuse, which he's probably gotten from the guards in prison and cops all his life, or if he's frustrated that he's out here, helping Cates, giving him every lead he's got, and still can't get a little decent treatment. The fact that normally he is so quick with the glib comeback makes the moments where he doesn't more effective.

Works for the part when they finally get fed up with each other and start throwing punches, too. It's funny that the cops arrived when receiving a report of two guys beating each other up so much faster than when Cates had the hotel operator call that an escaped convict was in a gun battle with the police.