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We love cops.
Well. We love cops in the movies, anyway. Or in elaborate, private fantasies involving uniforms and handcuffs. The point is, we can't get enough of seeing someone out there, pounding the pavement, cleaning up the streets. There's something deeply embedded in our culture about the certain kind of hero that works on the force, and there have been enough cop movies made so that every kind of character is familiar to us. We've all seen wise-cracking cops, tough cops, buddy cops, gun-toting cops, tortured cops. Fat cops, skinny cops, cops who climb on rocks. Cops who hate the job but do it anyway because they know that it's the right thing to do. When they go out into the night to battle the forces of darkness, armed with a gun and a badge, we're right beside them, cheering every time a bad guy gets iced- more so if the cop says something funny right afterwards. And over time, the way that good and bad cops are portrayed in the movies has changed, usually as a result of a particular movie or actor.
We love our cops to be tough, and they've never come tougher than Clint Eastwood. The man is carved from stone- the toughest kind of stone. Not pumice. Granite, or something. When he played Harry Callahan for the first time, Eastwood brought a new kind of cop to the movie-going public- the detective who gets cursed out by the chief, who plays by his own rules, who gets the job done no matter what. With DIRTY HARRY, Eastwood created one of the great movie stereotypes, and opened the doors to instantly-recognisable parodies for years to come ('You're off the case, McGarnagle!' 'You're off your case, Chief''). Thanks to Eastwood, we know that the Dirty Harries of the movie world are the good guys. The second we see a cop making his own decisions and going against the department, we know that this is a man of honour, a man we can trust. We also know that if we stick around for long enough, we're going to find out if some punk feels lucky.
But every Lone Ranger needs his Tonto- a cop alone is a cop in trouble, and that's why they have partners. The familiar formula of mismatched partners slowly learning, while bullets speed over their heads, to trust each other and to work together as an unstoppable ass-kicking team has been played out on the silver screen time and again, and nowhere better than in 1982's 48 HOURS. The inspired decision of putting the rough-hewn, stone-faced Nick Nolte together with comedy's enfant terrible, Eddie Murphy, paid off big time, creating a classic cop flick. The black/white cop/con mix allowed both Nolte and Murphy to play to their strengths- Nolte is at his best playing raging juggernauts, and Murphy's rapid-fire, expletive-laced comedy has never been put to better use than in the scene in the redneck bar. And despite the verbal firefights between the two at the start of the movie, we know from the beginning that they're going to end up as friends. It re-affirms our faith in cops, that they're basically good guys, and Nolte, as the representative of the law in 48 HOURS, fulfils that ideal.
Then Murphy went solo and created movie history with BEVERLY HILLS COP (and also made everyone who saw the movie think 'Holy shit. I think I might just be in love with Eddie Murphy'). Axel Foley was everything a movie cop should be- street smart, tough, cool and with the best theme music of the 80s. But what made the character so instantly memorable was Murphy's portrayal. Murphy's high-energy performance as the cop who was never lost 
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for a wiseass comeback was his big Hollywood break, and deservedly so. Suddenly it wasn't enough for a cop to just be tough; he had to be cool as well. Murphy's running circles around the staid, conservative Beverly Hills PD was just further proof of that- it was only the influence of Detroit detective Axel Foley that helped the suit-wearing Beverly Hills detectives Rosewood and Taggart crack the case- . Foley encourages them to break the rules, to bust into the bad guy's hideout without warrants, to just be that little bit cooler. To follow in such footsteps, movie cops needed to be slicker.
Of course, the only thing better than one slick cop is two slick cops. Enter TANGO AND CASH, the movie that taught us that Stallone and Russell should be the main billing in every movie ever made, from GODZILLA to THE PRINCESS DIARIES. A new element here was the addition of some action movie staples- giant explosions, gunning down hordes of enemies, and well-muscled heroes that strolled through everything that the enemy could throw at them, dropping one-liners all the way. TANGO AND CASH took something from every chapter of the How-To-Make-A-Cop-Movie book- mismatched, maverick partners, both of whom spent as much time shooting off their mouths as their guns. By this stage of their careers, both Russell and Stallone knew how to make a solid action movie, and both of them spent the movie playing off the other, Stallone as the straight-edge cop who gets the job done and makes jokes, and Russell as the wild man who makes jokes and gets the job done. The action-movie vibe that was peculiar to the eighties (and has been, so regrettably, lost) is present throughout the entire movie, and hero cops never appeared to be so superhuman.
That move was stopped dead in its tracks by the arrival of Detective John McClane and DIE HARD, the new templates for the action genre. DIE HARD re-wrote the rules across the board- here was a cop who didn't have all the answers, who was cut off, isolated and alone, who did the job even though he didn't want to. He was part of a team but his only contact with them was by radio. Outnumbered, out-resourced and out-gunned, his only hope was to kill his opponents before they killed him. Rather than solving a crime, McClane had to stay alive, take out Hans Gruber and his goons, and try to keep the hostages alive. Despite being an action hero, McClane was all too human. The scene where he drags himself along the floor, blood pouring from his feet, was showing us that cops aren't immortal, that they have the same vulnerabilities as the rest of us, but that one man, tired and alone, would always still press on. So, incidentally, would the franchise, and the immortal line 'Yippi ki yay, motherfucker,' which is suitable for use in every field of human endeavour.
That more 'human' side of the cop hero came to the fore when Michael Mann realised that all he wanted to do was make smart action movies that told stories about a) men in the line of fire and b) things exploding. 1995's HEAT was notable for a number of reasons- the on-screen pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, the adeptness with which Mann handles the rippling effect that men under pressure have on those around them, and the juxtaposition of De Niro's icy cool and Pacino's roaring fury. Pacino, as the leader of a group of detectives, alternated between biting sarcasm and barely-restrained violence in a performance that says to the viewer, here is a man just like you. He has needs, he has 
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desires, he has fears, and he is being bent and broken by the job he does, the job that keeps you safe at night (although, unlike you, he gets to shoot Tom Sizemore). This is the heart of our romance with the police force; the concept of the martyr that suffers to protect and serve.
In addition to becoming more human as time goes by, cop movies have become slicker as well. Like everyone else, I was amazed by just how entertaining S.W.A.T was. An hour and a half of Samuel L. Jackson and Colin Farrell running around shooting the shit out of things was always going to be a winner, but who knew that it would turn out to be quite so cool? All the elements were there- a French villain who all but twirled his mustachios, hardened cops from every walk of life, betrayal, and old nemeses. S.W.A.T was old-fashioned good versus evil entertainment, with lots of guns and explosions thrown in for good measure. It's impossible not to like Samuel L. Jackson as the seasoned veteran, Colin Farrell as the driven hero, Michelle Rodriguez as the tough-as-nails girl and LL Cool J as the funky powerhouse. Rather than just one cop, we get a whole team of them for our money, racing against time to catch the bad guy.
The next team cop venture that Colin Farrell starred in was a very different venture. Michael Mann's bleak, aggressive 2006 film MIAMI VICE visited specialist territory- the world of undercover cops. Farrell and Jamie Foxx play men who have to divorce themselves from their emotions, who have to submerge themselves and put their lives on the line to bring down some justice. They suffer and they risk everything in order to fulfil their mission- once again, a mission that they perform not for themselves, but for others. Stakes are raised and raised again, and before too long, consequences are unavoidable. MIAMI VICE details a kind of stubborn, realistic heroism by its leads; there are no jokes, no bravado, merely a core of steel running through the cops who have picked up an assignment full of grave dangers, both seen and unseen.
The cop movie is the subject of a loving homage in the recent, brilliant outing by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, HOT FUZZ. The film is firmly in the buddy-cop camp, with Pegg's super cop frustrated at every turn by his well-meaning but hopeless new sidekick. The list of references to cop movies in Hot Fuzz reads like a who's who of the greats of the genre- POINT BREAK, LETHAL WEAPON and BAD BOYS, to name a few. The beauty of the movie is that Pegg and Wright know that we've seen this storyline before- they've seen it themselves and loved it, and in HOT FUZZ they have their tongues most definitely in their cheeks. Which isn't to say that HOT FUZZ is not a great movie in and of itself; it's one of the funniest and most entertaining films to come out of the UK in the last decade.
So with DIE HARD 4.0 and BEVERLY HILLS COP 4 on the horizon, some of the stalwarts of cop movies will soon be back among us. They're like old friends, stories and heroes that we know and love. The law will always be welcome on the silver screen- it's when we see Bruce Willis or Eddie Murphy kicking some ass that we forget all about the speeding fines we got, or the time the police came around to tell us to put on some pants and go back inside. The heroic policemen and women of celluloid have done more to improve the standing of the police department with the world's citizenry than any community initiatives ever could, and that's most likely the way it's going to stay.
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| Simon Smithson |
Simon was crushed when he found out that 'Ghostbuster' was not an actual vocation, and so went with the next best thing - writing columns for Internet movie sites. He's working on a proton pack of his own, but it's going to take some time.
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