The movie "48 HRs" featured veteran actor Nick Nolte who would later nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in "The Prince of Tides" and this would feature the silver screen debut of comedian Eddie Murphy. Before this film Murphy was a regular on Saturday Night Live a show on NBC which still goes strong today. The film was distributed by Paramount Pictures and was released in theatres on December 8,1982. Directed by Walter Hill (he directed another Paramount film The Warriors in 1979) Hill also co wrote the script of the movie with Steven E.DeSouza,Larry Gross and Roger Spottiswoode and produced by Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver.
The plot of the movie follows Inspector Jack Cates (Nolte) of the San Fransisco Police Department desperate to capture an escaped convict named Albert Ganz (James Remar) and his associate who helped him escape named Billy Bear (Sonny Landham) while tracking the convicts down Ganz held a woman hostage before killing two of Cates' fellow cops and taking off with his gun. Desperate and armed with a replacement gun,Cates tracks down Ganz's former ally in Reggie Hammond (Murphy). Reggie is doing a three year prison sentence for armed robbery. After a chance meeting Reggie offers to help Jack get Ganz if he can get him out of prison. So a 48 hour time period was put in place and I'll never forget the line Cates said to Hammond "We ain't partners we ain't brothers and we ain't friends,I'm putting you down and keeping you down until Ganz is locked up or dead and if Ganz gets away you'll be sorry that you ever met me." Then Hammond's responds to Ganz's threat "I'm already sorry" After a bunch of frustrating leads and Hammond "playing a bad cop" at Torchy's a hangout where Billy Bear used to work giving Jack the run around he and Reggie get into a fist fight which was broken up by uniform cops. Then Reggie finally reveals the real reason behind his hatred for Ganz. Years prior he,Ganz,Billy Luther (David Patrick Kelly) and Wong robbed a drug dealer of half a million dollars and the money was and still is stashed in the trunk of Reggie's car in a downtown parking garage. Instead of splitting the cash Ganz sold Reggie down the river and that's how he ended up in prison it was also the reason why Ganz and Billy adbucted Luther's girlfriend Rosalie that want to get Reggie's money in exchange for her safe return. Fast forward to the bus chase scene. After Luther gave Ganz the money,Ganz turns around and shoots Luther and presumably his girlfriend (but that probably was cut from the movie) as the villains escape Cates and Hammond crash through the window of a Cadillac showroom. After getting his ass reemed out by his supervisor. Jack and Reggie make one last attempt to get Ganz and Billy. They head back to Billy Bear's girlfriend's place where Ganz and Billy used as a hideout. Reggie kills Billy as a gunfight between the heroes and Ganz ensues. In the end Cates avenges his fellow officers death my shooting Ganz to his death. After Reggie had sex with a woman he met earlier that night Reggie and Jack share a laugh before taking him back to prison.
The film itself cost $12 million to make and it did $78.9 million in the box office. "48HRS" was the movie in which started the buddy cop film genre and would catapult Eddie Murphy into superstardom as one of Hollywood's greatest comedians.
I rank this movie at #5 in my favorite movies of 1982 and I was only 4 going on 5 when this movie was released. I watched the whole movie back in 2007 I got a kick out of Jack's threat to Reggie before leaving the prison it would be revisited later in the film after the fistfight and Reggie's confession but this time Reggie threatened Jack by saying "We ain't partners and we ain't friends if Ganz gets away with my money you'll be sorry you ever met me." and Jack's response was "I'm already sorry"
No comments:
Post a Comment