Bastille Day (aka The Take) (2016)

Apparently filmed before the Charlie Hebdo massacre but released after, this action movie is loaned a gritty political realism through its Paris setting, a city that in the movie experiences an act of terrorism and a chaotic aftermath as multiple agencies descend on the city to chase the pickpocket assumed responsible, but that the gritty realism was unintended becomes clear as the pickpocket and Idris Elba's CIA operative form a Lethal Weapon pair of mismatched crime fighters who run around Paris dodging bullets until a really not very sensible Die Hard siege ending.

★★☆☆☆

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Hot Pursuit (2015)

The premise (an uptight rookie cop escorts an 'opposite', a glamorous Colombian drug informant, across America and they bicker but ultimately, after surviving much danger, become friends), while hardly original, should work, especially with the likeable presence of Reese Witherspoon as the cop and Sofia Vergara as the informant, but the comedy is so unsophisticated, the performances so dialled in, and the action set pieces so laboured and unremarkable (during a freeway chase, for example, a tour bus crashes through...witches hats, and after getting evicted from a nightclub sting operation, the cop wangles her way back into the building by...going through the door), the only thing worth watching is the outtakes which run as the credits roll - they show that Witherspoon and Vergara do in fact have chemistry and are likeable, but this has somehow been stripped from a tired final product.

★☆☆☆☆

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K-9 (1989)

This differs from Turner and Hooch, released only three months earlier, in the way that the German Shepherd of the mismatched cop-dog duo is the straight-laced, authoritative, respectable Tom Hanks one while Jim Belushi does a slobbering Dogue de Bordeaux version of a cop-with-a-deathwish a la Martin Riggs/Axle Foley; which movie you prefer will largely depend on your actor and your dog breed preferences and how much you can tolerate this movie's weak love triangle-involving-a-dog subplot.

★★☆☆☆

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Black Rain (1989)

Ridley Scott's occasionally brutally violent buddy cop action movie takes Michael Douglas' cop Nick Conklin (a Martin Riggs type - he even sports the mullet) and his more even-tempered partner, Charlie (Andy Garcia) to Osaka to handover a yakuza criminal to the Japanese authorities, and while it is plainly and simply inconceivable to think these loose cannons would be permitted to carry on their rogue Lethal Weapon-style antics during the Japanese police investigation into counterfeiting that they become privy to, and harder to imagine even a hothead like Conklin putting himself in so much danger by wilfully headbutting and kinghitting yakuza crime figures over the course of his illegitimate, non-jurisdictional, "unwanted tag-along" police work, the movie manages to be an engaging clash-of-cultures action thriller and does achieve an occasional ring of cultural authenticity during all the nonsense, filmed as it is on location in Japan and populated with Japanese supporting actors, Ken Takakura, Yasaku Matsuda, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Shigeru Koyama. 

★★★☆☆

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Turner and Hooch (1989)

Turner and Hooch is essentially a buddy cop movie except that one of the buddy cops is whiny, dopey, incessantly barks, and has an irritating schtick - he teams up with a drooling Dogue de Bordeaux to solve a not very interesting crime and of course the mismatched pair grow to love each other despite their initial differences.

★★☆☆☆

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The Other Guys (2010)

Early on, hot-shot buddy cops, the sort of beefcakes that traditionally tear up the silver screen in action movies, die being stupidly heroic and into their macho places step desk cops Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, a pair of Prius-driving, Little River Band-appreciating, wooden gun-bearing, bickering man-children, so the not very funny running gag here is that as a buddy cop movie, this drags its feet and is no The Nice Guys, no Central Intelligence, no Jump Street.

★☆☆☆☆

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National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)

Even less funny than The Hungover Games and as puerile as Movie 43, this National Lampoon's comedy is a Lethal Weapon spoof featuring Emilio Estevez in the mulleted Riggs role and Samuel L Jackson in the Murtaugh role and is yet another film belonging to the bigger-than-you-realised Hollywood genre, dismal-comedies-that-you-can't-believe-really-famous-people-agreed-to-appear-in.

☆☆☆☆☆

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The Nice Guys (2016)

This oddity, a buddy cop comedy set in an elaborately realised 70s LA, has mismatched private investigators searching for a young woman-on-the-run, and what is so refreshing and disarming about it is that you can enjoy its unexpected, laidback mystery and Ryan Gosling's hilarious turn as a bungler without having to buy into a cynical, overbearing, greater franchise - and no sooner do you think that, the thoroughly enjoyable movie ends with the strong suggestion of a sequel.

★★★★☆

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Hot Fuzz (2007)

This is a hilarious genre-mashing comedy - part Lethal Weapon buddy cop action flick, part Miss Marple English village mystery, and part The Wicker Man - about a very earnest, high-achieving city cop posted to a small English village where the beat is particularly quiet but after a hilarious sequence showing the policeman exerting his zero tolerance on bemused villagers, schoolchildren and geese, a sinister criminal network with creepy ritualistic practices rears its head.

★★★★☆

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Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

As a kid, I was mad about this buddy cop sequel to Lethal Weapon that reunites Riggs and Murtaugh on a case investigating a rascist drug-dealing South African diplomat, but now, watching it again, the extent of its success beggars belief with nothing in it even closely resembling real police work and while the zippy story offers plenty of humour and tension between the cop duo and the bad guy, it is otherwise about as complex as a two-hour fistfight.

★★★☆☆

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Lethal Weapon (1987)

One interesting thing about this buddy cop action movie is the nostalgic image of its young, lithe and mulleted star, Mel Gibson - he plays cop-with-a-death-wish Riggs who partners with police officer and grounded family man Murtaugh (Danny Glover) to break a drug-smuggling ring - but the most interesting thing is how popular an action flick this was, spawning three sequels despite essentially being a protracted fist fight - largely plot-free, shallow, ridiculously macho, devoid of any creative flourishes and completely free of special effects.

★★★☆☆

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Stray Dog (野良犬) (1949)

A rookie cop in post-war Japan seeks to recover his stolen colt pistol and ends up involved in a manhunt for a murderer in this Akira Kurosawa police-procedural noir classic - said by some to be the first buddy cop movie - a richly detailed depiction of daily Japanese life but also revealing of the extent of Japanese society's code of individual responsibility, suggesting that when responsibility is left to slip, stray dogs turn rabid.

★★★★★

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Tango and Cash (1989)

Rascist (at one stage, Kurt Russell's Cash impatiently screams at a Chinese man to speak English) and sexist (sisters need chaperoning, and an on-duty policeman asks two women on the street for a threeway), but somehow this vacuous 80s buddy cop story is tolerable - nostalgia for children of the 80s like me and a means of marvelling at how much more politically correct the world now is.

★★☆☆☆

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The Heat (2013)

The funny moments in this mostly unfunny buddy cop comedy are, first, when Melissa McCarthy's rough-as-guts street cop throws a watermelon at a perpetrator, and second, the slightly un-PC moment when Sandra Bullock's by-the-book opposite is asked earnestly if she is a man or a woman - and that's it.

★☆☆☆☆

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21 Jump Street (2012)

Fans of the hit 80s tv show about cops undercover in American high schools (which took itself quite seriously) will be curious to see this movie-length comedy version, most amusing when it plays on the idiocy of obvious adults trying to pass themselves off as schoolkids, and maybe those besotted by Channing will enjoy it too.

★★☆☆☆

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