They don't get along.They can't get along. And then, of course, they fall in love.
No? Didn't Danny Glover and Mel Gibson have man-crushes in Lethal Weapon? Didn't Dan Aykroyd secretly pine for Tom Hanks in Dragnet? Didn't Tango love Cash? Same-sex marriage may not do well at the ballot box, but it's dynamite at the box office.
The latest suspect in the police line-up, Cop Out, is a big movie. Everything about it is Big. Or used to be: Just last week, its director, the counter-cultural Kevin Smith (Clerks, Zack and Miri Make a Porno) was booted off a Southwest Airlines flight for being generously proportioned.
His new movie stars Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, the latter best known for Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock; the former for having been so big that at one time he could do a cop-buddy movie without a buddy (the Die Hard franchise).
That was, of course, some time ago. For the macho Hollywood career on the ropes - or, apparently, the ageing maverick who wants to go mainstream - there exists the default mechanism of the buddy-action flick.
They've all done 'em: Stallone, van Damme, Schwarzenegger (The Last Action Hero), Schwarzenegger (Red Heat) Schwarzenegger (Kindergarten Cop, with Pamela Reed playing the rare female partner).
Eddie Murphy has done multiple films in more than one cop-buddy franchise (Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs). Willis is actually coming back for seconds, having done The Last Boy Scout, which wasn't actually about cops, but had all the right stuff.
But so do many Hollywood pictures - to the point that the cop-buddy formula might be considered representative only of what makes mainstream movies work at all: Conflict.
If someone wanted to remake, say The African Queen, couldn't Will Smith and Martin Lawrence bicker their way down the Ulanga just as well as Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart? Couldn't Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker (Rush Hour) remake a Tracy-Hepburn comedy, say Pat and Mike?
Where the cop-buddy movie does push things forward is in matters of race. Few genres have been so regularly, insistently diverse about pairing black and white - Glover-Gibson; Murphy-Nolte (48 Hrs), Willis-Damon Wayans (The Last Boy Scout); Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones (Men in Black I and II); Jamie Foxx-Colin Farrell (Miami Vice); Wesley Snipes-Woody Harrelson (Money Train); Smith-Kevin Kline (Wild Wild West) and even Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal (Running Scared).
White-on-white has been done, of course, from the seminal 1974 Freebie and the Bean (with James Caan and Alan Arkin) through to the 2007 British comedy Hot Fuzz (with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost).
But the examples of Caucasian cop comedies - Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett in Hollywood Homicide, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in Starsky and Hutch - sort of, uh, pale in comparison, to either the black-on-black pairings (Bad Boys I and II) or, given the resilience of the Rush Hour machine, the Chinese/African-American combo platter.
Mixed-race cop teams are a safe way of pursuing diversity (and a larger audience) because race is seldom the core issue of dispute between the principals.
Their friction is usually more about lifestyle - Glover's grounded family man versus Gibson's suicidal lunatic; Murphy's street-wise Axel Foley versus Judge Reinhold and John Ashton's by-the-books detectives (Beverly Hills Cops); Burt Reynolds' child-hating lawman versus the 8-year-old Norman D. Golden II (Cop and a Half).
Sometimes the partners seem like different species. Sometimes they are (Hanks and the dog in Turner & Hooch).
Usually, though, it's all about world view, not genomes.
For all the vulgarity, violence and imminent disaster of the cop-buddy movie, it's not danger that's being peddled.
Quite the contrary: Formulas get repeated because they work, and anyone who's champing at the bit to see Cop Out will be expecting - and wanting - the tried and true.
Besides, the cop-buddy movie is such an entrenched part of moviegoing culture that any tampering with its tropes and conventions would probably be considered a Class A movie felony.
The sentence: back-to-back showings of National Security (Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn), Double Team (van Damme and erstwhile NBA star Dennis Rodman) and Theodore Rex (Whoopi Goldberg and a talking dinosaur).
"Cop Out is basically about two guys sitting around talking, which is something I know a little something about" says director Kevin Smith, whose dialogue-heavy Clerks remains one of the more vulgar, and vulgarly hilarious, debuts in the history of independent film.
But how does a regular-guy-type guy like Smith, whose repertoire includes Zack and Miri Make a Porno, stand-up comedy, film producing and ownership of a comic-book store in Red Bank, New Jersey, get to direct what is, in large part, a Hollywood action flick - one that would seem to be the very antithesis of his shtick?
"Warner Bros asked me," Smith said. WB president Jeff Robinow "sent me a script, and I thought it was by these friends of mine, the Cullen brothers, which it was".
"But I thought it was a goof.. Then I get a call from Jeff asking 'Did you read the script?' I said, 'What script? That was from you?'."
At first, Smith was a bit out of his depth, he admits, regarding the action sequences. Still, the heart of the film, he said, is the relationship between the two principal NYPD cop characters on the hunt for a rare baseball card - Jimmy (Bruce Willis), whose missing collection is supposed to be paying for his daughter's wedding, and Paul (Tracy Morgan), whose doubts about his wife's faithfulness are driving him to distraction.
Smith said his approach was similar to that of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas - "without making any comparisons," he said.
"Just the way Lucas and Spielberg remade the films they'd grown up with, I wanted to make a cop-buddy movie," he said.
"I'd watch them growing up and say, 'They should have done this, they should have done that'. This was my chance to do it the way I wanted."
