| Devin Warner |
Shakedown plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 23rd, through Sunday, January 25th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
I am so happy that this movie is being shown. While waiting in line to buy a ticket for the first 80’s Action Extravaganza at the Trylon, John wandered the line and asked everyone for movies they would like to see. My response was Shakedown, a buddy cop action film starring Sam Eliot and Peter Weller. It was a movie I had discovered just a year prior as my roommate and I watched a slew of buddy cop movies during the peak of the pandemic. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, the buddy cop genre is one of the best subgenres of film and is the culmination of the buddy film and the crime film genres respectively. This genre can be traced back to such films as In the Heat of the Night with Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger but would become incredibly popular in the 1980s thanks to Eddie Murphy with the releases of 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop.
The buddy cop film typically follows a series of tropes. Generally, it follows a pair who become “buddies” involved in some sort of law enforcement who learn to work together to save the day. In my personal opinion there are 4 main criteria that a buddy cop film needs to have in order to be successful:
- It needs to have a solid relationship between our two main characters in an odd couple dynamic.
- One of the characters needs to have some sort of connection to law enforcement.
- It needs to have some sort of humor. Doesn’t have to be a comedy necessarily but there should always be some comedic elements, particularly between our leads.
- It needs to go out with a literal bang.
Ratcliff, you’re pulling duty with the animated cat—Sergeant (Last Action Hero)
Every buddy cop film is about two people coming together to solve a case. This dynamic is what sets the tone of the film and ultimately is what the quality of the film hinges upon. If the audience doesn’t care about our dynamic duo then the entire thing falls apart. The typical archetype of these characters is a loose cannon who likes to play by their own rules or is inexperienced who is matched with a more reserved, serious and experienced character. This dynamic leads to the two having initial conflict but then over the course of the film the two begin to see eye to eye and unite just in time to stop the bad guy. The difference makes each character feel unique and makes them stand out, resulting in a more dynamic and memorable film. The trope for this subgenre has been so ingrained that parodies of the genre, like The Last Action Hero, depict one officer’s job as assigning mismatched partners.
The need for two dissimilar leads also led to many great pairings of two famous actors that get to work together to sell the movie. Hong Kong gave us the great pairing of Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh in Police Story 3: Supercop but my personal favorite buddy cop film is the pairing of Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell in Tango & Cash. Kurt plays Gabe Cash who is the more wildcard character, which lines up with many characters Russell has played before. To add an interesting spin, they contrast him with Stallone who unexpectedly plays against his normal type. Gone is the bravado of a Rambo, Cobra or John Spartan. Instead we get Ray Tango, this dweebish uptight Stallone in the stiffest suit imaginable and big wire rim glasses to make him look like a pencil pushing nerd. Knowing many of Stallone’s other roles makes this even more fun as this new persona of Stallone delivers a ton of comedic moments between the two.
This trope is also fantastic if you’re into weirder films because in order for these movies to differentiate themselves the pairings can take you into strange places. There is the further microgenre called the buddy cop-dog film, which as the name suggests partners a cop with a dog, with such notable ones as Turner & Hooch and K9. Beyond that though we get into fantastically odd pairings such as Stephen Chow and a ghost in the Hong Kong film Look Out, Officer or Sylvester Stallone and his mom in Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot.
Even the cops think we’re cops—Ryan (Lets Be Cops)
One of the big questions that needs to be considered with this genre is whether both characters need to be cops in order to make it a buddy cop film. In my opinion the answer is no, and in some cases I think you can actually get away with neither of them being a traditional cop. Some will argue that movies such as 48 Hours or Turner & Hooch aren’t buddy cop films because Eddie Murphy is a convict and Hooch is a civilian dog, but I respectfully disagree.
Some key examples of not needing either member of the buddy cop duo to be traditional cops are all Shane Black-written and/or directed films such as The Last Boy Scout, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys. All of these movies feature private investigators rather than cops. In the case of The Last Boy Scout and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang only one in the buddy pairing is a private investigator. In The Last Boy Scout, private investigator Bruce Willis teams up with a former NFL quarterback, Damon Wayans. This angle works well because a trope for buddy cop cases is that the buddy duo are often in over their heads and one of them is a fish out of water which allows for more unique methods of foiling the villain, such as (SPOILER ALERT) Damon Wayans stopping the assassination of a Senator by hitting him in the face with a football so the bullet misses (END SPOILER)—it’s wild. Movies like Rush Hour or Beverly Hills Cop make use of one member being from out of town/country to give them a disadvantage but using the private investigator angle allows our heroes to already be the underdogs from the get-go as they don’t have access to the same type of resources of a typical police setup.
In Shakedown, Sam Eliot is a cop but Peter Weller is a lawyer and much of the movie feels like a courtroom drama rather than a big action film. When Weller is forced to be involved in more actiony moments the audience really feels like he is in over his head. Making one member of the buddy duo an outsider also allows for the genre to continue without becoming stale because it allows for stories to bring in different careers and types of characters to make more unique films. Some work great like the aforementioned Last Boy Scout and some do not like Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot.
You know what the difference is between you and me? I make this look GOOD—Agent J (Men in Black)
Now this is what could get me into some hot water with some people in the comments but I think that a buddy cop movie needs to have some comedic moments. The main reason I think that the buddy cop film needs comedy is because it bears many similarities to the romantic comedy film genre. Instead of an initial meet cute situation our couple meets via a crime cute. The initial meetup frequently begins with tension between our two very different partners but over the course of the film the “buddy” aspect comes in and a true relationship forms between them that by the end the partners are generally “ride or die” for one another. I rewatched Hot Fuzz for this piece and writers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg definitely understood this dynamic by even having Pegg and Nick Frost’s characters have the awkward “do you want to come in for a drink?” moment outside Frost’s house and eventually leads to a classic romcom date moment of Pegg winning a giant stuffed animal for Frost at a carnival game. The connection between the characters, the fun riffing off each other is what makes them endearing to the audience. In the classic Men in Black, the premise doesn’t work as well if it’s just two dudes who are competent at stopping aliens. You need the chemistry of a cocky Will Smith and the grumpiest of old men Tommy Lee Jones to make it the memorable film we know it today.
Movies such as Se7en and Training Day don’t fall into buddy cop films despite being films that fit the mismatched pairing. I think part of the reason they don’t fall into this category is because the “buddy” aspect is gone. Buddy is a friendly and fun term to mean friendship and in both films cases that’s not really the dynamic of the partners. The movies don’t need to be full-on action comedy films but there needs to be some moments of levity. Shakedown in particular is not a laugh a minute movie, but the dynamic between Weller and Elliot does bring levity to what would otherwise be a dark and dour film.
I won’t argue that it wasn’t a no-holds-barred, adrenaline-fueled thrill ride, but there’s no way that you could perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork—Nicholas Angel (Hot Fuzz)
Now we hit the final point of what makes a buddy cop film work. This is where all the groundwork of our pair’s case has been leading. Our mismatched pair have come together to stop the bad guy and save the day. This all goes down with a big showy action set piece and the showier the better. More serious and grounded buddy movies such as one precursor to the buddy cop genre The French Connection even had a car chase sequence that, while pretty tame by today’s standards, was very elaborate for its time. Now in everything from 22 Jumpstreet, Lethal Weapon,or the under-appreciated Showdown in Little Tokyo, we get tons of explosions, car chases, and carefully choreographed final fights to blow the audiences’ minds.
So as not to spoil the film as I feel that Shakedown is an underseen gem, I will say that this one ends with one of the most unhinged and wild action set pieces I’ve seen in any movie. I definitely think people will be into it and it will play well with an audience. After I sent the link to this movie on Trylon’s website to my old roommate I initially watched it with, his only response was “I wish we could experience the ending of Shakedown again for the first time.”
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon