The buddy cop subgenre of action cinema has been done to death. We all know the clichés: a hotshot young detective who likes to bend the rules is paired with a by-the-book veteran cop on the brink of retirement and, as they delve deeper into the case, they form an unlikely bond in spite of their differences. When we go into these movies, we can almost see the whole plot play out in our heads. But it still remains an endearing genre because it’s a prime opportunity for talented, well-matched actors to show off their chemistry. Here are The 10 Best Buddy Cop Movie Duos, Ranked.
Lee & Carter (Rush Hour)
The key to any great buddy cop pairing is on-screen chemistry shared by the two actors. While the Rush Hour movies are not spectacularly made, the chemistry shared by Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker — in their roles as Yan Naing Lee and James Carter, respectively — made all three films more than watchable.
Tucker has unmatched comedic energy, while Chan is great as the straight man with deadpan line delivery. We’ll probably never get to see a fourth Rush Hour movie, but at least we have a comedic trilogy of Chan and Tucker barbing each other to enjoy for years to come.
John McClane & Zeus Carver (Die Hard with a Vengeance)
It should come as no surprise that at some point during its transition from a spec script called Simon Says to the eventual movie, Die Hard with a Vengeance was being developed as a Lethal Weapon movie. John McClane had been a lone wolf in the first two Die Hard films, and in the third one, he suddenly had a sidekick to complain about his recklessness.
Thanks to Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson’s hysterical back-and-forth — not to mention Willis playing McClane as only he can play him and Jackson bringing his own performative flourishes to the role of Zeus Carver — this duo stands out, instead of feeling like a rehash of Riggs and Murtaugh.
Jack Cates & Reggie Hammond (48 Hrs.)
Before Lethal Weapon, before Bad Boys, and before Rush Hour, there was 48 Hrs., the movie that started it all. Nick Nolte plays Jack Cates, a grizzled cop, while Eddie Murphy plays Reggie Hammond, the convicted felon that he lets out of prison for, you guessed it, 48 hours to help him with a case involving Reggie’s former partner-in-crime.
48 Hrs. has all the tropes of the buddy cop genre, giving its characters all of the classic differences — different races, different worldviews, different sides of the law etc. — to create the first buddy cop duo in Hollywood history, which still stands as one of the best.
Agents J & K (Men in Black)
The gimmick of the Men in Black franchise is that the government agency the characters belong to keeps Earth safe from alien intervention and then erases people’s memories of alien encounters. But that gimmick alone isn’t enough to endear audiences. Viewers came for the alien-infested sci-fi spectacle, but they stuck around for the easy chemistry shared by Will Smith as the streetwise fish-out-of-water Agent J and Tommy Lee Jones as the fusty, aging M.I.B. veteran Agent K.
Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson shared great chemistry in this year’s Men in Black: International spin-off, too, but no pairing will ever top Smith and Jones.
Jackson Healy & Holland March (The Nice Guys)
Shane Black immediately won back the hearts of any moviegoers he may have alienated with Iron Man 3 (which suffered from studio meddling by Marvel’s Ike Perlmutter) with 2016’s The Nice Guys. It’s a curious blend of hard-edged action, pulpy neo-noir, and absurdist comedy, with a dash of political satire thrown in there for good measure.
Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe hilariously played their private-eye characters as polar opposites: Crowe’s Jackson Healy is a no-nonsense tough guy, while Gosling’s Holland March is a bumbling buffoon who’s always just winging it. It’s a real shame that we’ll probably never a sequel.
Johnny Utah & Bodhi (Point Break)
Point Break has a fantastic premise for a buddy cop movie: an undercover FBI agent infiltrates a gang of bank robbers and becomes such good friends with their leader that he doesn’t want to turn them in. (Sound familiar? Swap out “bank robbers” for “street racers” and it’s the premise for The Fast and the Furious.) Keanu Reeves plays the FBI agent, Johnny Utah, while Patrick Swayze plays the leader of the gang, Bodhi.
There are delightfully ridiculous flourishes, like the bank robbers being down-to-earth surfers and Johnny Utah being an NFL star who joined the FBI after an injury prevented him from continuing his football career. It’s Reeves and Swayze’s palpable on-screen chemistry that makes it work, as Johnny Utah and Bodhi seem to really care about each other.
Jack Walsh & the Duke (Midnight Run)
Not all buddy cop movies actually have cops in the lead role. If it’s an action comedy centering on a mismatched pair that involves the law in some way, it’s a buddy cop movie, even if neither of the buddies are cops. In Midnight Run, Charles Grodin plays Jonathan “the Duke” Mardukas, a mob accountant on the run from the feds, and Robert De Niro plays Jack Walsh, the bounty hunter who wants to bring him in.
Midnight Run plays like an action-packed Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, with the Duke constantly trying to escape and Jack trying to keep his mark away from the cops in order to collect his reward. De Niro and Grodin’s unparalleled chemistry elevates the movie to a classic.
Axel Foley & Billy Rosewood (Beverly Hills Cop)
This is the second item on this list in which one of the characters is played by Eddie Murphy. Murphy’s nonstop comic energy and improvisational prowess makes him the perfect foil for a stuffed-shirt character like 48 Hrs.’ Jack Cates or, in this case, Beverly Hills Cop’s Billy Rosewood, played by Judge Reinhold.
Reinhold co-starred alongside John Ashton as a pair of L.A. cops on Axel Foley’s trail when he conspicuously arrives in Beverly Hills and starts acting on his own authority, having been put on sabbatical by his captain in Detroit following the murder of his friend. Against all odds, Rosewood and Foley become good friends.
Nicholas Angel & Danny Butterman (Hot Fuzz)
In their follow-up to the similarly brilliant Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost brought the tropes of the buddy cop movie to a rural English village for one of the greatest comedies of the 21st century. In Hot Fuzz, Pegg plays Sgt. Nicholas Angel, London’s toughest cop, who is transferred up north to sleepy Sandford when his impeccable track record starts to make the rest of his department look bad.
In Sandford, Angel grows suspicious of the unusually high accident rate and teams up with bumbling PC Danny Butterman (Frost) to get to the bottom of it. Despite being an overt parody of a buddy cop pairing, Nicholas and Danny are also one of the all-time best.
Riggs & Murtaugh (Lethal Weapon)
It’s fair to say that no buddy cop pairing will ever top Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh from the Lethal Weapon franchise. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover nail the characters individually and also share incredible on-screen chemistry that only felt more and more real as the sequels went on and the two actors became closer friends.
When they met in the first film, Riggs’ anything-goes attitude was immediately at odds with Murtaugh’s play-it-safe credo. Over the course of four Lethal Weapon movies, Riggs got a soon-to-retire Murtaugh to love police work again, while Murtaugh got a suicidal Riggs to appreciate life again.