48 Hrs.

48 Hrs. (1982, Walter Hill)

Often mentioned as the first 'buddy-cop-action-comedy' (yes, that's quite a mouthful), a sub genre very popular in the 80s and 90s. If it wasn't the first, it was the most trendsetting, if only for casting Eddie Murphy (fresh from Saturday Night Live) as the well-dressed, ultra cool inmate who is released for 48 hours to help hard nosed, shabby cop Nick Nolte tracking down two cop killers and a missing sum of money.

Mixing strong violence with fairly lighthearted comedy, director Walter Hill introduced a brisk, tongue-in-cheek style of film making that would dominate Hollywood action movies (not only cop thrillers) for the next decade. He was asked by the producers to tone down the violence, but the action scenes are still quite potent, notably an early shootout in a hotel which sets the whole thing in motion.

The film works thanks to the charisma of the two leads, but the rather flimsy script  (see under miscellaneous) has not emerged unscathed from the numerous rewritings it was submitted to. A more intriguing idea about the criminals kidnapping the local governor's daughter and threatening to kill her within 48 hours unless a large ransom money is paid, was dropped in favour of more screen time for Murphy and his routines. The scene with Murphy personating as a police offer and searching and snarling at a redneck ("I'm you worst nightmare, a nigger with a badge!") is a standout, other routines have become too familiar over the years.

48 Hrs. is still quite enjoyable, but it suffers from this typical noisiness that marred many movies from the Eighties, with the actors shouting at each other most of the time (apparently that was supposed to be funny in those days) . The shouting wears you off after a while, but luckily the film has a running-time of a mere 90 minutes.

Miscellaneous:

The film apparently had a long and interesting genesis: the original idea of a cop solving a kidnapping with the help of a released inmate (the former partner of the kidnapper) dates from the early Seventies. According to Walter Hill, he was asked in the late Seventies to rewrite the script as a vehicle for Clint Eastwood and Richard Pryor, but the project was abandoned because Eastwood wanted to play the criminal. The project then went from Columbia to Paramount and was finally turned into a Murphy-Nolte vehicle, with Walter Hill co-scripting and directing

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