buddy cop

English

Noun

buddy cop (plural buddy cops)

1. (chiefly attributively) A film and television genre with plots involving two people of very different and conflicting personalities who are forced to work together to solve a crime and/or defeat criminals, sometimes learning from each other in the process.
   • 2006, Howard Hughes, “Criminal Record: An Introduction to Crime Movies”, in Crime Wave: The Filmgoers’ Guide to the Great Crime Movies, London, New York, N.Y.: I.B. Tauris, →ISBN, page xxi:

     Buddy cop movies were raised to an art form in the eighties.

   • 2015, Jeffrey A. Brown, Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture, University Press of Mississippi, →ISBN:

     Thus buddy-cop films exemplified a finding of common ground between reckless, suicidal cops and responsible family cops (Lethal Weapon), between fast-talking convicts and tough, world-weary detectives (48 Hours), between strict Russian police officers and boorish Chicago cops (Red Heat).

   • 2022, Kim Taylor-Foster, Why We Love Die Hard, Running Press, →ISBN:

     More action-heavy than other buddy cop movies, Die Hard paired the gut-punching blend of eye-popping stunts (John McClane leaping from a roof with nothing but a firehose tied around his waist) and insane violence (that close-up of the bad guy’s knees being shot to pieces) that audiences adored from the money-spinning Rambo franchise with the sparky dialogue of Beverly Hills Cop, injected a dose of satire, and wrapped it all up with a new kind of action hero.

   • 2023, Racheal Harris, “Masculinity and the Buddy Cop Film”, in Steven Gerrard, Renée Middlemost, editors, Gender and Action Films 1980-2000: Beauty in Motion (Emerald Studies in Popular Culture and Gender), Emerald Publishing Limited, →ISBN, page 53:

     By applying elements of Joseph Campbell’s philosophy of the heroes’ journey (2008) and Jung’s archetypes (Miller & Chodorow, 2004) of the hero, the mother, the sage and the child, this chapter will explore the hero’s journey, with a specific focus on how younger partners in the buddy cop narrative transcend from boys to men, and how masculinity is defined within this space through the lens of their peer relationships.

   1. (nonattributively) One of the two characters.
      • 2012, Katrina Hill, Action Movie Freak, Penguin, →ISBN:

        With a long pedigree of heroic duos that can be traced back to Holmes and Watson, the original buddy cops, this genre of films tends to be more focused on inter-character chemistry than it is on big explosions or drawn-out fistfights.

Further reading

• Buddy cop on Wikipedia.Wikipedia