One of the great legacies of film is the buddy cop movie – two wildly mismatched partners forced to stick together to solve a huge mystery and/or blaze through a series of over-the-top action sequences designed to devastate municipal economies. It’s a trope we’ve enjoyed for years, most recently exemplary displayed in Bad Boys For Life, the latest entry in one of the best buddy cop series in history. In celebration of both that film’s digital release and the interest of public service, I’ve ranked ten of the best buddy cop movies ever made. This is not a definitive list, as I’ve left out all explicit spoofs like Loaded Weapon 1 and any movie involving a dog partner, but you should regard it as commandments chiseled in stone as far as things to watch while stuck inside during quarantine.

10. The Other Guys

The_Other_Guys_movie_image_Will_Ferrell (2)
Image via Columbia Pictures

The Other Guys should technically be disqualified because it is a spoof of buddy cop movies, but the chemistry between Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell is undeniable. (It’s so good, in fact, that they did a whole other series together with the Daddy’s Home movies.) Ferrell plays a ludicrously stuffed shirt police detective primarily concerned with low action crimes like tax evasion, while Wahlberg longs for the action of a car chase or a high stakes drug bust. It’s a send-up of the buddy cop tropes, but the movie does such a good job of restraining Ferrell and Wahlberg from their respective personas that it results in a wholly unique film that continually defies your expectations in the best possible way. Ferrell is the quiet straight man, and Wahlberg is the outspoken idiot who can’t actually pull off any of the badass things we’ve seen him do in countless other films. It creates a fun game that is indelibly watchable and doesn’t require you to be familiar with the tropes it’s playing with.

9. Die Hard with a Vengeance

die-hard-with-a-vengeance-bruce-willis-samuel-l-jackson-1
Image via 20th Century Fox

Die Hard is a series about one man fighting against the odds, so I admit it’s unusual to see a Die Hard movie on a list of buddy cop films. But Die Hard with a Vengeance teamed Bruce Willis’ grizzled hero cop John McClane with Samuel L. Jackson’s prickly pawn shop keeper Zeus Carver to stop a mad bomber from blowing up half the city. Willis and Jackson had recently appeared together in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, but the two don’t actually share any scenes in that film, so it was exciting to see these two commanding actors carry an entire movie together. They have great chemistry, and Jackson fits easily into the Die Hard mold of an everyday guy thrown into an incredible situation. It’s also very funny, which is not necessarily unusual for a Die Hard film (McClane deals exclusively in gallows humor), but Die Hard with a Vengeance cleverly utilizes Zeus as an outside voice commenting on all the wild bullshit McClane engages in that we normally just take for granted as stuff we see in action movies. It’s like watching Samuel L. Jackson watch a Die Hard movie, while simultaneously acting in a Die Hard movie, and it is excellent. It’s an unpopular opinion, but not only is Die Hard with a Vengeance one of my favorite buddy cop movies, it might also be my favorite film in the Die Hard series. And with that sentence, I think I may have just been fired.

8. Rush Hour

rush-hour-tucker-chan
Image via Warner Bros.

Rush Hour was a surprise hit in 1998, pairing the unlikely duo of Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan in an action comedy that was typical of Chan’s American films in the 1990s. But what makes the Rush Hour series stand out is his chemistry with Tucker, who essentially just comments on all the crazy stunts Chan whips out to dismantle the bad guys. Tucker is somewhat of a cinematic unicorn – he’s appeared in just over a dozen films in the past three decades, so getting him to commit to an entire franchise is no small feat. And the Rush Hour series is pure popcorn excellence. The films haven’t necessarily aged well – there are several jokes that play entirely on Chan and Tucker’s race, Roman Polanski cameos in Rush Hour 3 as an extremely creepy man, and the entire Rush Hour franchise was directed by noted sexual harasser Brett Ratner – but the series is an extremely good time. Chan’s stuntwork is dazzling as always, and Tucker’s presence provides the gobsmacked incredulity that audiences feel when they watch Chan’s movies. Plus, they clearly enjoy each other’s company, and their comradery rises above all the dated material to make the movies an all-time fun watch.

7. 48 Hrs.

48-hrs-movie-image

48 Hrs. arguably created the buddy cop genre, and it catapulted Eddie Murphy from a television player on SNL to a bonafide movie star. (It was his first movie!) Murphy plays Reggie, a small-time crook in prison for armed robbery, when Detective Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) decides to get Reggie a 48-hour release to help him catch a pair of cop-killing criminals. There has never been a more grizzled human being than Nolte. If he, Tommy Lee Jones, and Harrison Ford got into a grizzled-off, the planet would simply implode. Pairing that extreme black hole of energy with Murphy’s cherubic wisecracking personality results in an all-time classic movie that launched decades of imitators. 48 Hrs. spawned a sequel 8 years later, but the original is the only one you need concern yourself with.

6. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

kiss-kiss-bang-bang
Image via Warner Bros.

Before he was directing Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Shane Black dropped the actor in the middle of a goofball hardboiled detective story alongside Val Kilmer, and the end result is delightful. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang kind of came out of nowhere – it’s a meta comedy about detective stories and Hollywood and crime thrillers in general. But it manages to be a meaty detective story of its own, boosted by the performances of Downey and Kilmer, who frequently butt heads as an actor studying to be a private detective and an actual private detective respectively. And Michelle Monaghan deftly steps in during the scenes in which Kilmer is absent to keep the buddy cop vibe going, trading barbs with Downey’s character as they lurch haphazardly through the case. It’s very funny, very smart, and very original. Do yourself a favor and watch it.

5. The Nice Guys

ryan-gosling-russell-crowe-the-nice-guys-image
Image via Warner Bros.

Written and directed by the godfather of buddy cop movies, Shane Black, The Nice Guys is a pitch-perfect comedy crime thriller. Centered around a murder in the 1970s Hollywood porn industry, the movie is carried by career-high performances by Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe. Gosling arguably has the more obviously fun role, playing relentlessly self-assured alcoholic private detective Holland March, but Crowe’s gentle menace as hired goon turned detective Jack Healey quietly steals the show. He’s a soft-spoken, thoughtful man who forms a strong bond with March’s young daughter Holly while simultaneously engaging in vicious acts of brutality against the film’s antagonists (and, in a particularly funny sequence, against March himself). Black is a fan of gumshoe novels and subversive filmmaking, and The Nice Guys does an incredible job of flipping the detective genre on its head by throwing the case into the laps of two guys who are absolutely not equipped to solve it. Apparently the script was originally written as a pilot for a TV series, and while I would have been delighted to tune in week after week for the continued adventures of March and Healy, I’m glad we were given the film version featuring Gosling and Crowe instead.

4. Tango & Cash

tango-and-cash-sylvester-stallone-kurt-russell
Image via Warner Bros.

Tango & Cash was the very last movie released in the 1980s, and it absolutely shows. Imagine if the first Lethal Weapon had been written on ten times the amount of cocaine and 8,000% of the hubris, and this motion picture is the result. It’s a gonzo action comedy featuring Sylvester Stallone at the height of his career, improbably playing a meticulously dressed police detective who is exceptionally good at playing the stock market. He looks like he could flex his head and shatter his glasses at any moment. That plot description is already completely insane, and we haven’t even discussed Kurt Russell yet. Russell plays the streetwise daredevil detective, a guy who cheerily beats suspects in custody while cracking wise and throwing back waves of his glorious hair. The two are professional enemies, but are forced to team up after they are framed for murder and sent to an improbable prison the likes of which would not be replicated until the 1995 Denzel Washington thriller Virtuosity. Tango & Cash is the definition of batshit – the ending sequence involves Stallone and Russell storming Jack Palance’s palatial fortress with an actual tank and confronting Palance in a literal hall of mirrors. It’s goofy, dumb fun, and I challenge you to sit through the entire film without laughing hysterically at least three times.

3. Lethal Weapon

lethal-weapon-2-gibson-glover-social
Image via Warner Bros.

It’s hard to overstate the impact Lethal Weapon had on the buddy cop genre, and on action films in general. The formula already existed (most notably in films like 48 Hrs.), but Lethal Weapon cemented the trope of the wild loose cannon paired with the stuffed-shirt family man, and it did so without being ridiculous. At least, not in the first film. Written by Shane Black, the indisputable architect of the genre, the original film eschewed the comedy normally associated with buddy cop films and leaned firmly into pathos. Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs is a deeply troubled man, and the movie gives us plenty of unflinching looks at his day-to-day life on the ragged edge of oblivion. Meanwhile, Danny Glover’s Roger Murtaugh can’t wait to be done with the police force and retire to his fishing boat when Riggs gets dumped in his lap. I can’t stress enough that “I’m too old for this shit” and “You’re a loose cannon!” were not originally played for laughs, and if you sit and think about the real world implications behind those tropes, you’ll realize that they were never intended to be funny. The sequels steered the series into Looney Tunes territory, and they’re all very enjoyable as comedic action films, but the original Lethal Weapon broke new ground in presenting us with characters that were fundamentally broken in specific ways, and only succeed when they work together. Also, Mel Gibson fistfights Gary Busey on a suburban lawn in front of 100 cops, and it is wonderful.

2. Hot Fuzz

hot-fuzz
Image via Universal Pictures

Hot Fuzz is easily Edgar Wright’s best movie. Part action movie and part action movie send-up, it does the difficult task of juggling wry observations of buddy action tropes while delivering some of the best versions of buddy action tropes ever captured on film. Simon Pegg unexpectedly plays the role of a rigid police officer immaculately, and it’s arguably his best performance if for no other reason than it’s so against type and he pulls it off so well. Nick Frost is his naïve protégé, which was also somewhat against type for him at the time because most American audiences had only seen him as Pegg’s crass friend in Shaun of the Dead. He’s so endearingly earnest that he comes off as Pegg’s little brother, and the two actors’ legendary chemistry is put to excellent use as two small village police officers in the UK. It’s simultaneously a buddy cop satire and a legitimately great buddy cop movie. The only reason it’s not my #1 pick of the genre is because it’s technically a spoof, but the action and comedy are so good in this movie that it stands above almost every other film of its kind, and I’m depressed there was never a sequel.

1. Bad Boys

bad-boys
Image via Sony

Bad Boys is the definitive buddy cop movie series, as far as I’m concerned. Other films came first, and Lethal Weapon undeniably did a lot to push the genre forward, but Bad Boys is the ultimate realization of two wacky assholes blowing shit up under the paper-thin defense of a police badge. A buddy cop movie is entirely dependent on the chemistry between the two lead characters, and the chemistry between Martin Lawrence and Will Smith is so electric you barely even need to write a movie around it. I would watch those two guys sit down and read the phone book together, so the offer of watching them go on high-speed freeway chases involving a big rig throwing driverless cars at them like projectiles, drive through a bank with Michael Shannon in their trunk, and get into international shootouts that would likely cause some sort of global conflict is completely irresistible. Each one of the Bad Boys films delivers enough action and comedy for several movies, so the fact that it’s all one series is almost unfair. Bad Boys is the best, hands down.