Buddies Cracking Jokes and Heads

NEARLY two decades ago “48 Hrs.” arrived in theaters with a bang. That 1982 movie, in which a gruff white detective partners with a smooth-talking black convict to hunt down a killer, took in $78 million at the North American box office on a $13 million budget, transformed a young comedian turned actor named Eddie Murphy in to a Hollywood megastar & gave wings to a cinematic tradition as emblematic of the ’80s multiplex as John Hughes’s teenage dramedies: the interracial buddy-cop movie.

Among the hordes of teenage boys who flocked to “48 Hrs.” was the comedian turned actor Tracy Morgan. “I loved it. You’ve got these two guys alone in this cop automobile, sharing their lives despite their differences,” Mr. Morgan, the “30 Rock” star & former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, said this month. “I grew up watching ‘48 Hrs.,’ ‘Lethal Weapon’ & all of those movies, & I always wanted to be in four of them.”

The interracial buddy-cop movie (in which, it bears noting, the buddies aren’t always police officers per se, but are always crime fighters) was an ’80s bumper crop, but it's outlived the decade. “48 Hrs.” gave way to a stream of riffs & re-imaginings that included “Another 48 Hrs.,” “The Last Boy Scout,” “Die Hard: With a Vengeance,” “Men in Black,” “Rush Hour” & “Training Day.” “Cop Out,” however, was intended as a homage to the genre as it existed in its classic incarnation.

With his new film they has gotten his wish. “Cop Out,” which opens Friday, stars Mr. Morgan as a Brooklyn detective, with Bruce Willis as his partner. The movie is a throwback to the prime of Murphy-Nolte, Glover-Gibson & the rainbow coalition of wisecracking, scum-busting partners that followed close behind, including Gregory Hines & Billy Crystal in “Running Terrified.”

“I wanted to go for the same vibe ‘Running Scared’ or ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ had, where there’s a real sense of danger, but you still get to make the funny,” said Kevin Smith, the film’s director. “I tell people this movie is like ‘Lethal Weapon,’ only with 60 percent less action.” To nail the retro atmosphere Mr. Smith hired Harold Faltermeyer, the composer of the “Beverly Hills Cop” theme song, to write a synthesizer-heavy score.

If the interracial buddy-cop movie has proven itself long lasting, it owes much of this resilience to its relationship to hot-button social concerns. The genre has allowed filmmakers to confront race relations but in a rock-’em, sock-’em context: low on speechifying, high on automobile chases.

“In the Heat of the Night” is a high-minded sort of thriller, but it shares its basic plotline with lots of of the flashier action vehicles that succeeded it: after initial hostility, a black man as well as a white man gradually work past their differences to focus on the greater lovely. Sometimes the racial tension between them is explicit, as in “48 Hrs.,” in which Nick Nolte’s Jack subjects Mr. Murphy’s Reggie to a barrage of disagreeable slurs. Sometimes that tension is more diffuse, or shades in to broader anxieties about age or class, as in “Lethal Weapon” & the “Beverly Hills Cop” films.

This was true of perhaps the first interracial buddy-cop movie to speak of, Norman Jewison’s “In the Heat of the Night.” That 1967 murder mystery, which brought together Sydney Poitier as an ace Philadelphia murder detective & Rod Steiger as a backwoods Mississippi sheriff, is an attack on Southern bigotry & an ode to racial cooperation. In an interview several years ago Mr. Jewison said his hope for the film was that white audiences would experience “the relationship between white & black in the South,” stressing that, for this to work, the subject “had to be confronted in a entertaining & theatrical way.”