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Much like the romantic comedy, the buddy-cop film follows a familiar emotional trajectory:I cant stand you …
Buddy cops dont kiss, but maybe theyll high-five.
These movies are the original bromances.
Will they start out hating each others guts?
Will they eventually come to admire one another?
First, though, we had to establish some ground rules.
(Midnight Runsometimes shows up on lists like this.
But only Robert De Niros character is a cop, so were not including it.)
Also, we elected to focus only on films in which the cops eventually do bond.
Hey, they never really do end up buddies in that movie.)
Last, dogs totally count as cops.
(These touchy subjects are so much easier to bring up when there are guns around, apparently.)
Fittingly, this was the very last studio movie released in the 80s.
They dont make movies like this anymore … and thats probably a good thing.
A sequel was never made, though.
Turns out Hanks had more ambitious items on his dossier.
(Then again, this is true of a lot of movies on this list.)
Still,Stakeoutis way, way too violent for no apparent reason.
Russell Crowe is the muscle his role has shades ofL.A.
But Crowe and Gosling are a surprisingly agile team, and the film is agreeably old school.
Tellingly, on its opening weekend, it finished a disappointing fourth behind three sequels.
Connery wore his macho swagger well inThe Rock and has a ball putting Goodspeed on blast.
In a perfect world, they would have made dozens of movies together.
Blacks patented guys-guy humor and inventive action sequences are given extra juice by Downey and Kilmers smart-ass chemistry.
We prefer the latter reading, while acknowledging the formers compelling case.
But what if those roles reversed over the course of the film?
These films torpedoed the buddy-cop genre to rebuild it.
7.Men in Black(1997)
That kid is funny.
Very, very funny.
That was stoic Tommy Lee Jonessassessmentof his co-star onMen in Black, which cemented Will SmithsA-list ascension.
Jones gets laughs just by looking witheringly in Agent Js direction.
6.48 Hrs.
Most of his movies for the next 20 years, for better or worse, would be no different.
(Pesci is great, but by the third movie,whew, enough is enough.)
Which we suppose is something it will have to answer for forever.
Every story beat ends up being increasingly more terrifying and, ultimately, horrifying.
This is the photo negative of the buddy-cop movie; this is what happens when it all goes wrong.
