For a guy who was a big Eddie Murphy fan in the 1980s, it's crazy that I've never seen this movie. I know I saw part of it on cable once, but its gritty style that was a holdover from the 1970s turned me off. I think I was expecting something more like Beverly Hills Cop, which probably also had a sort of gritty style in parts, but at least also had palm trees.
I decided to finally rectify that on Sunday night after my wife and I finished Coming 2 America, when it came up after the movie as part of a list of movies other Amazon viewers had also watched. I know I owe you a post on Coming 2 America, but I don't know how to start that post, and hopefully writing the review will get me going.
It was already 10:30, which was my first problem. But this was no usual Sunday night. We had Monday off for Labour Day, so it seemed as good a time as any to push my bedtime. Not as much as I ended up pushing it, but at 96 minutes long, 48 Hrs. should have only taken me until just after midnight.
What actually happened was that I got really sleepy at about the 30-minute mark. I intended to just take a short nap -- I can usually get away with this type of thing -- but I slept for nearly an hour. In the past I might have given up and gone to bed at this point, but I've stopped splitting movies over two days if I can help it. It's something I used to do regularly and barely ever do anymore.
But buoyed by additional courage from not having to get up on Monday morning -- though who am I kidding, I'm awake by 7:30 no matter what day it is, or how late I stay up the night before -- I dug back into the movie, moving back the goal posts to an expected 1 a.m. completion.
The problem was, in that hour of time I was asleep, our AppleTV obviously timed out and turned itself off. The only real problem with that was it gave me a chance to get really disoriented.
Of course, at the time I thought there was a second problem. Even though Amazon Prime does what all the other streaming apps do, which is remember where you paused your movie, 48 Hrs. started playing from the beginning again when I got back into the app. That struck me as unusual but I obviously didn't ponder it any further.
Instead, I forwarded to about the 30-minute mark, remembering that that was about as much of the movie as I had watched. The content on screen was not familiar, though. So I thought maybe I was misremembering where I paused it.
I went back to earlier in the movie and started watching about the 10-minute mark, just to refresh myself. I had to have gotten this far. Didn't I? It still didn't look very familiar. Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy were there, but they were doing things I hadn't remembered them doing.
Remember, I was very sleepy.
After watching two or three chunks of this movie and continuing to scratch my head about what was happening, I finally figured it out. And pressing the back button to the menu confirmed the title of the film I was watching:
Another 48 Hrs.
Told you I was sleepy.
I might have gotten it sooner except that Murphy is wearing the exact same suit, and they repeat the bit where someone comes to get him out of a jail cell and he's listening to "Roxanne" by The Police on his walkman, singing along in that falsetto voice familiar to anyone who gobbled up Murphy's standup comedy like I did.
But this whole disorienting experience took another 35 minutes or so in total.
So now I was staring down 12:45 with another hour to go in the movie. I should have called it and just made this the rare example of the movie I finished off the next morning. But I wasn't really liking it and really wanted not to sit with it again.
Which brings us to my eventual aforementioned 1:45 bedtime.
Yeah, the instinct I had about 48 Hrs. way back in the 1980s was correct. It didn't do it for me. I don't think I laughed once, which is an impossible thing to imagine for Eddie Murphy in his prime. It was Murphy's first film -- the guy was barely 20 years old when they filmed it -- but that prime started early and lasted for a good decade, followed by 30 years of mediocrity after that, occasionally broken up by special performances.
But no, I didn't laugh, and in fact I cringed plenty. This movie really didn't age well. All sorts of people -- prostitutes, lesbians, Black people, Native Americans -- are referred to using casually despicable terminology, another holdover from the 1970s. This came with the territory, but when even Nolte busts out the n-word in referring to Murphy at one point -- to his face -- it was a bit too much for me if the movie also still wanted me to like his character.
Another 48 Hrs. didn't come out until 1990, at which point I assume we were collectively a bit more politically correct. And I've already seen chunks of its first 30 minutes, so if I decide to watch it I guess I'll have a head start.
But I'm not really eager to get back to the adventures of Reggie Freeman and Jack Cates, even if Cates does later apologize for his use of the n-word. The movie made me long for Prince Akeem, even if his own new set of adventures left something to be desired.
More on that tomorrow, I assume, if I ever figure out what I want to say.
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