The rise and surprising appeal of the buddy cop movie

With the release of Ride Along 2, we take a look at the popularity of the buddy cop genre and its growth over the decades.

Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Paramount

I recently happened to catch a documentary about an academic in South America who was seeking to catalogue the existence of Amazon tribes, with a view to preventing logging or mining operations where these tribes live and keeping their heritage alive.

What was most amazing to me about these tribes wasn’t that they had never come into contact with modern human civilisation, never suffered from a common cold, or that they still lived the same traditional lifestyles that had been practised in their villages for millennia. Instead, it was the fact that they had never seen a buddy cop movie.

They are missing out. It is the genre that won't go away, and release last Thursday of Ride Along 2, starring the Ice Cube and Kevin Hart, adds another tale of a mismatched pair of cops reluctantly thrown together to fight crime to an already bursting portfolio.

The genre has been around for decades, producing films that range in quality from the good (Beverley Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon) to the bad (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) to the downright ridiculous (remember Whoopi Goldberg paired with a talking dinosaur in Theodore Rex? Didn't think so).

Film historians tend to point to Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949) as the first example of the genre, with Toshiro Mifune's rookie cop teaming up with Takashi Shimura's weathered vet to bring justice to bombed-out, postwar Tokyo.

Other notable early examples include 1967's In the Heat of the Night – one of the earliest examples of what would become the staple "conservative white cop teams up with street-smart black cop" subgenre – in which Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger are forced to become uneasy partners on the trail of a murderer in Mississippi, naturally learning to accept and respect each other along the way.

On the small screen, meanwhile, 1970s TV was awash with offerings from the genre, with the likes of the US show Starsky and Hutch and gritty British drama The Sweeney topping ratings on both sides of the Atlantic. Interestingly, cinema in the '70s seemed more obsessed with lone-wolf vigilante cops, in movies such as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson's Death Wish.

It was in the 1980s, though, when the genre as we know it today really took shape, with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours setting the comedy/action template that would run and run.

Up until then, cop movies had tended to play it straight, perhaps in part due to studios and agents that liked to give audiences what they expected from the stars. Straight actors were straight actors, and comedians were comedians, and never the twain would meet.

The '80s changed all that and produced some of the finest examples of the genre: Eddie Murphy's wisecracking Detroit cop Axl Foley teaming up with Judge Reinhold and John Ashton's strait-laced California detectives in Beverley Hills Cop, or Danny Glover and Mel Gibson swapping the traditional black cop/white cop dynamic in Lethal Weapon, in which Glover's conservative family man is reluctantly thrown together with Gibson's psychotic loose cannon.

As time went on, producers looked to branch out from the black cop/white cop trope, and although the maverick/strait-laced theme remained, we have been treated to film and TV variations such as cop and criminal (Murphy's Law, Bulletproof), cop and civilian (Armed and Dangerous), cop and incompetent cop (Ride Along), cop and dog (Turner and Hooch, K-9), cop and robot (RoboCop, TV show Almost Human), cop and dead cop (RIPD), cop and alien (Alien Nation), cop and talking car (TV's Knight Rider) and, of course, Whoopi's with a dinosaur in Theodore Rex.

The culture-clash race theme has been expanded over the years too, with East/West pairings becoming a popular theme in movies such as Rush Hour and The Corruptor. So why is the genre so unduringly popular? There are few truly great films among the list we've covered. Genre high points such as Beverley Hills Cop and Lethal Weapon are solid enough entertainment, but they're unlikely to make any serious "greatest movies" lists.

Ultimately, they offer a little something for everyone. Comedy, crime, mystery, action, dramatic tension between mismatched characters, a vehicle for our favourite actors, and maybe a cool car chase or two.

They are, in short, a smorgasbord of popular cinematic elements all wrapped up in a neat, usually none-too-challenging package that appeal to the whole family.

And if Ride Along 2 does nearly as well as its US$150 million-plus (Dh550m) grossing predecessor – a decent return for a film that only cost $25m) – or even if it doesn't, you can be sure we'll be seeing plenty more wisecracking, odd-couple pairings fighting crime on our screens for many years to come.

• Ride Along 2 is out now in cinemas.