All Cop and No Buddy Make Jack Ryan

I fucked around and this one got weird

Would you believe I set out to write this four times? We’re not talking proof reading it (I may never do that). We’re talking I started four separate documents, got anywhere between 300-500 words and then threw in the towel. All I wanted to do was share my thoughts, excitement and appreciation for the genre of movies known as “buddy cop,” but for which we will be affectionately calling them “action buddy comedies” because A) it’s a slightly less bad tasting classification, and B) most of the best ones are not cops i.e. The Nice Guys, Midnight Run, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Thelma. It should have been easy enough, but I struck out. I even got an extra swing like those uncoordinated sensitive kids the adults can’t bear to watch the brutality of life stomp on so early in their existence.

And if you’re reading this going this is the one he went with, you are not alone. Well you may be alone in that you’re the only one reading this, but between you and me, we share the same sentiment between me and you. That this could be better. But I’m not a quitter and I finish what I start. And so I quit trying to make this better so that I could finish it. And so I am a quitter too.

You may be noticing there’s a bit of sauciness to this writing. Well I just watched Jacqueline Novak’s special On Your Knees, and that woman’s rhythm is COVID level infectious. I almost told my friend about it, but then I thought I don’t need both of us talking like hip, intellectual New Yorkers. Or at least attempting to. So what you’re about to get is 2000 words on the return of the action buddy comedy and why that’s good for men and hopefully mankind in the tone of someone who spends a quarter of her 100 minute special accurately detailing how men are sensitive and delusional about their soft little wieners. A favorite moment of mine is when Jacqueline describes how feminine and not rock hard the penis is. She says if her boyfriend came out of the shower and said, “‘quick find the little woman on this man,’ it’d be an odd game, but I’d instantly have an answer.” In some ways, I think this whole mess of words is about how I wish “masculine” movies could acknowledge the fragility of the penis and model for us loving male relationships instead of reflecting the societal lie that broken men are better at saving the day because they’re broken.

The action buddy comedy is back. It went away in the early to mid 2000s. Nobody noticed because Liam Neeson was showing off a certain set of particular skills. But for about twenty years, action buddy comedies were the peanut butter and chocolate of the action movie genre. They’ve been around since Akira Kurosawa's 1949 film Stray Dog, but they came to mainstream popularity with 48 Hours, Midnight Run, and Lethal Weapon. Only the latter being about two actual cops. Then without much fanfare, the entree was taken off the menu. But this year, we have had three action buddy comedies (four if you’ll allow me to make an argument for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F) with a few more on the way. This is very good news because action buddy comedies have a recipe that gives them a taste other movies do not have. They are one part action movie which like a pie on a window sill attracts men just passing by. No matter how small the release, your guy friends know about it. Not all your guy friends, but the ones with Letterbox accounts and memberships to Vidiots. Here are four action movies released in the last year, one of them is fake. The Beekeeper, The Bricklayer, Trigger Warning, Land of Bad. Go ahead, ask your guy friend for help and to tell you which one is fake. Did he say they are all real? Because they are all real. Right now the second Jack Reacher movie, Jack Reacher: Never Back Down is #2 on my Netflix Top 10. That movie is atrocious, but it doesn’t matter because it’s one guy beating up some other guys to right some wrongs. So you start with the action movie genre in a bowl. Then you mix in the medicine. The broken men are forced to laugh at themselves, open up, self improve, and usually at least attempt to say “I love you” to their buddy partner. Action buddy comedies showed you could still be a good guy without being a stubborn asshole.

In the Lethal Weapon franchise, Riggs starts off as a smoking suicidal lethal Vietnam veteran. He gets a jumper off a roof by handcuffing himself to the guy and jumping off the roof. He dislocates his shoulder to get out of a straight jacket for a bet. He teases the psychologist assigned to him. And he taunts his partner to shoot him in the face. By the end of the franchise, he’s a husband, a dad, and he eats dog biscuits instead of smoking. How did this happen? He was forced to confront his demons by working with Murtaugh on multiple investigations. In Lethal Weapon 2, the villains rig a bomb under Murtaugh’s toilet so that when he gets up, he’ll explode. Well Riggs agrees to help him jump into the old iron bathtub and before they do it. They share some pauses and some “I knows.” This is macho code for “I love you.”

In Midnight Run, Jack lets The Duke go and gives him his old watch. A watch that represented his past life, his failings as a husband and a father. The Duke gives Jack 300,000 dollars. Dirty money that came from working for the mob. They both unburdened themselves from their haunted past and they had the courage to do this because they get beat up, chased by a helicopter, knocked into a river, shot at, and were forced into uncomfortable family situations in front of one another. They both learned they could be better people simply by spending time with another man.

In Bad Boys, Marcus comes right out and says “I love you,” at the end of the first movie. Mike says it back, even though the actor playing Mike, Will Smith, reportedly really didn’t want to. I don’t say that to disparage Will Smith (ok maybe a little), but to say, these men’s outpouring of love for one another was critical to the story. Most action buddy comedies do this. The Rock, Tango & Cash, The Last Boy Scout, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Nice Guys. They all have a moment where the men have to get quiet and share their feelings one-on-one. And most action comedies were written by Shane Black. Three of those five were. And so was the first Lethal Weapon. Even Die Hard with a Vengeance got in on the action. Zeus helps John McClane stop drinking and reconnect with his wife. And John McClane helps Zeus…well, ok so Zeus did most of the heavy lifting in that relationship. He seemed pretty content running a pawn shop and dropping pearls of wisdom on the youth. I mean not content. He rightfully distrusted white people. I guess John McClane helps Zeus trust white people. Maybe not my strongest point.

But then we got Hollywood Homicide and Money Talks and Starksy & Hutch. Every attempt got worse because they tried to make the cops buddies without making them love each other. Cop-Out was a drain on both characters (and actors) and Hobbs and Shaw was trying to capitalize on the comfort of a franchise that was too afraid to say that two men loved each other unless they were part of a family. Bonding became a footnote and the stories suffered. Then they fucked up and went ahead and took Liam Neeson’s kid.

When action buddy comedies stopped getting made, they got replaced by guys who were seriously broken, but rather than healing through bonding, they calcified their fractures into trophies to bludgeon people with. Movies like Taken, Jack Reacher, Wrath of Man, every other Liam Neeson movie, and yes my beloved John Wicks, changed the model for broken men. TV followed suit. Jack Ryan, Bosch, The Terminal List. All sad brooding men with so many sins received and dealt, they had no choice but to punish far more wicked men. It was no longer in fashion to write these fallen men into partnering up so they could laugh at their faults and potentially reflect on them for the sake of the relationship. It was their dysfunction that made them a formidable foe and that was too valuable to risk for mental health and social well-being. It was precisely because these men were broken that made them good at killing people. So instead of finding someone to love platonically, their loneliness and presumed self-loathing fueled them to save the day. We lionized sociopaths.

Sadly, I suspect for most men this is the fantasy. Hurt people hurt people and that’s what they like. Rather than seeing an opportunity for growth or change through vulnerability, reflection and companionship, they think it’s my addiction or curse that makes me valuable. I don’t have to risk someone finding out I’m a little boy with a peepee. Men have always been susceptible to crafting their identity out of what they like or do. So it makes all the sense in the world, meaning it makes no logical sense, but it does track as obvious, that men would cling to the imperfections as part of the source of their value and potential. As opposed to the healthy alternative of working through their unhealthy patterns of behavior and learning to laugh at them and say “I love you” to another man and letting that outpouring of emotion release them from the cage of rock hard cocks they’ve locked themselves in. We need men to know it’s OK to be more than the root cause of what made them who they are. I’m saying “them” and “they” but that’s just for what I hope is grammatical accuracy. I’m including myself in this mess.

In Jacqueline Novak’s special she says “if you see a Batman, there’s a fear of bats that preceded it. If you see a strength, there is a fear that has been turned inside out, overcompensation.” It makes for a compelling origin story, but it’s not a forever story. And so maybe it’s not all Liam’s fault that we have Jack Ryans and Jack Reachers. Maybe it’s comic book movies fault. Which means it’s comic books fault, which means it’s propaganda and patriarchy if we want to follow the stream up to the lake. But since this is about movies, let’s stick with them. Comic book movies emerged as origin stories and then they tried to make them indefinitely. An impossibility. You can’t keep doing the origin. You have to move past it for growth. But we didn’t. So while we as audiences experienced micro growth for characters over two hours, we really never got out of the “I am Iron Man” loop of I am what is compensating for what I am not.

Sure we had Thor: Ragnarok, an action buddy comedy of sorts, though Thor’s attention is split between Hulk, at times Bruce Banner, his brother Loki and Valkyrie. Even in the Shane Black penned and directed Iron Man 3 (Black being the lord and savior of action buddy movies), Tony Stark does confront the relationship to his armor and spends most of the movie without it’s protection, but he doesn’t have another guy there to open up to. Someone to say he loves. At the end we find that he’s been talking to Bruce Banner in a sort of therapy session, and hey that’s progress, I guess. Men are going to therapy. But I think in order for real progress to be made, men need to be vulnerable in front of other men and they need to see that they can have relationships with men and cast off their shadows and not lose their ability to be great at something. Like kicking the shit out of other dudes.

That’s why I’m so happy to say 2024 seems like the year we might invite healing masculine partnerships back into our culture. There have been four action buddy comedies that I’ve clocked so far with at least three more on the way.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

The fourth installment to one of the greatest buddy cop movies of the last fifty years. This is the first of the action buddy comedy revival I saw and it’s the one that opened my eyes to the fact that we’d been missing something. Martin Lawerence’s Marcus is a buffoon in this movie. He’s eating jelly beans during gun fights and hypnotizing albino alligators. It’s all very silly and it works. Not only does he bring much needed comedic relief to the movie, the franchise, and the genre, he also helps save the day without sacrificing his dunce hat. Somewhere along the way men’s fear of foolishness or sensitivity overloaded and so they overcompensated for it with hyper masculinity and dark characters refusing to admit they might have a problem. I mean it’s pretty much the whole reason we got a fourth Bad Boys. Will Smith got upset in public, slapped a man, and then had to go back to the franchise well to win back over the public. He couldn’t face being the butt of a joke, so he had to go back to putting on purple suits and driving a Porche where the only joke is his partner’s insatiable appetite for hot dogs and candy. But at least we got to laugh again.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.

True this isn’t exactly a buddy action movie, though who says a buddy has to be one? Couldn’t we be a bunch of buddies? A bushel of buddies? I think the Beverly Hills Cop movies have always demonstrated that it’s best not to be too serious about your work and your identity. Axel Foley’s whole thing is to make himself look like a fool playing various, and sometimes troubling characters, so he can get access to information, people and places. And his cohorts, Rosewood and Taggart are made to look like fools time and time again, until they relent and admit that yes, maybe upholding a specific professional, untarnished image is more trouble than it’s worth. Let your guard down and go to a strip club for a steak. Yes it’s still a hyper masculine activity, but in the first movie they talk about not being embarrassed about whether they have erect penises or not, and in the second movie, they admit that they may lose their jobs. They stop bending the truth to make themselves seem untouchable. It’s not ideal it takes booze, red meat, and topless women to accomplish this, but men are inexperienced at this. You can’t just throw them in the pool without water wings.

Thelma

This is the best of the buddy action movies on the list and maybe in the last seven years. True Thelma is not a hyper masculine man. She’s a 93 year old woman. And her partner is a similarly old man with a titanium hip named Ben. But old people are often stubborn in their independence and dogmatic in their assertion that they don’t need help. So what are men but old people in young bodies? That’s why old men are often the worst. They’re both men and old. Anyways, the stars of this buddy comedy are not the worst. They are the most lovely and inspiring odd couple partners. I think this movie is a 10/10 and its message that being wrong and accepting help is not something to be embarrassed about, but something to grow from, is inspiring and heartwarming. It reminded me of my grandparents, and it gave me hope. I once heard second hand about a wedding where someone’s parents said they loved a wedding because it was an act of optimism and hope for the future. I’ve heard similar sentiments about having kids. I’ve never quite been able to adopt that perspective. But watching two 90 year olds traverse the valley on a scooter in search of stolen money made me feel like the future might in fact be fruitful.

Deadpool & Wolverine

This should have been the most action buddy comedy of all time. Plus it’s a comic book movie without an origin story. It could have delivered us from the notion that men are nothing if not their weaknesses turned into strengths instead of both weak and strong. That’s what I was hoping for. Remember when I said I had started multiple drafts of this, well I started a couple before seeing Deadpool & Wolverine. It was my intent to write a persuasive piece not to get you to go see it because it wouldn’t need you to see it. I knew it would make a zillion dollars. Nor was it to get you to even like it, most of my friends outwardly hate the franchise, but to get you to root for it to be an action buddy comedy so that it could usher in a new wave of them. I never finished writing it before seeing it not once, but twice. In 3D.

I went by myself out of shame, which is its own little sampling of my relationship to my public identity and self-loathing about being a stupid man. In all this examination of masculinity and identity and protecting one’s ego, I seemed to be a perfect specimen for study. I was so giddy to see the movie, but couldn’t bring myself to invite anyone or to even say it aloud publicly. So in writing this, I guess you could say I’m doing the work (Pause for a pat on the back). Here I am admitting I was excited to see this very childish, rude and obnoxious movie. And you know what, I had a great time. Oh the confessions keep on coming and they feel great. I loved the jokes, the violence, the self-awareness, the nostalgia. It had almost everything. Except…

Except that it wasn’t an action buddy comedy. Almost embarrassed by the sincerity of doing a straight action buddy comedy, the movie hid itself in a tongue-in-cheek “bromance.” Which is a bummer. Wolverine plays wingman at the end for Deadpool, but that’s the most terrified version of male companionship. Our excuse to hang out is to save the world and help you get laid. They couldn’t in earnest say they loved each other as two platonic men, so they went ahead and made a couple jokes inferring their fighting was sex, and their teaming up was titillating for everyone. I think that overshoots the goal.

I have found that when I want to express genuine affection or love to my male friends, usually in text, where it feels a little safer, I will refer to them as “dude, buddy, or man.” As in “Dude, I really appreciate you,” or “love you buddy.” Or sometimes I’ll put a little slang on it so it seems more casual, “love ya,” or “I love playing with y’all.” That last one is in reference to doing an improv set with my friends. A set in which it would not be uncommon for us to do a scene where we broke our blowjob machine because we gave it too many blowjobs, or two guys performing mutual masturbation in a bathtub. I have no problem making jokes about sex with men, but saying I love a man still seems to be difficult. Alas, the work is never done.

So in Deadpool & Wolverine, I didn’t want their homoeroticism to be the overcompensation for their fear of male intimacy. I didn’t want their Batman moment to be gay. I wanted it to be loving. I wanted to hear them say “I love you.” I wanted to usher in a new generation of men who accept each other for their faults, reach out for connection and love one another for their efforts.

In the next couple months, we’re getting Wolfs, The Instigators, and The Union. I’m not sure if any of these movies will achieve the action buddy comedy high marks of Lethal Weapon, Midgnight Run, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 48 Hours, or The Nice Guys. I can’t see Pitt and Clooney being comfortable enough to let us laugh at their ineptitude in Wolfs. Though the fact that it is Wolfs and not Wolves is a little promising. I don’t think we’re ok with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as people for The Instigators to work. And The Union stars Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, so it has to evade being a rom-com, and I can’t see a scenario where Wahlberg says I love you to any guy. But I still think this is a promising year for more macho male affection. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think it won’t be long before I can ask my friend Dan if he wants to go watch Glen Powell and Sterling K. Brown crack skulls together because they love each other and because I love him.