Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A hard-nosed cop reluctantly teams up with a wise-cracking criminal temporarily paroled to him, in order to track down a killer.
48 Hrs. essentially invented the buddy-cop genre template, making it genuinely novel for its era — the volatile Nick Nolte/Eddie Murphy pairing crackles with real tension and chemistry that defined the formula everyone else would copy. Murphy's explosive debut performance is a genuine 4, commanding every scene. The plot is serviceable but thin, a fairly straightforward chase narrative propped up by character dynamics rather than story ingenuity. Cinematography is competent urban noir but unremarkable. The ending deflates somewhat, resolving conflicts a bit too neatly after the electric energy of what preceded it.