10 Most Unlikely Badass Buddy Team-Ups

There are two types of people in this world: the kind who watched True Detective hand-in-hand as brothers and sisters going into that final midnight every Sunday evening…and those who desperately need to start catching up on HBO Go. Right now.

True Detective is so hardboiled that its lead characters of Det. Rust Cohle and Det. Marty Hart should have cracked under the scalding water weeks ago. Maybe they have. Perhaps, time is a loop, and they have been forced to do this again and again for eternity, scrambling in that devil’s trap for one of the best finales in TV history. In which case, we have been discovering what an unlikely awesome pair Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson have made ad infinitum. That’s kind of nice, because now that we have seen McConaughey and Harrelson together, whose sole previous collaboration was the deservedly forgotten EdTV, it is hard to believe we’ll have to let them go for Season 2. But such is life. Still, in a series of random, fortuitous occurrences, we have been previously blessed with unlikely badass buddy team-ups, and like old Cohle and Hart, we are somewhere on that loop wishing to see them again. Here is a list of 10 of the most unlikely team-ups.

Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs. (1982)

In a list like this, relying on buddy cops, particularly funny ones, can feel a little bit too safe. But it is impossible to ignore the brilliance Walter Hill and company had in pairing Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy at the height of the latter’s Saturday Night Live fame in this ultimate union of bullets and laughs. As Reggie Hammond and Jack Cates, Murphy and Nolte developed the definitive cop-partner banter that so many would steal from in later years. Cates is a world-weary San Francisco copper who loses a friend in the line of duty the same day he has to give Reggie 48 hours leave from prison to hunt down the killer. The two fight, argue, and are so entertaining that there was no way that it could simply end with Reggie going back to prison. But that’s Another 48 Hrs.

Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction (1994)

Surely not cops, these are a couple of the most loquacious gangsters you’re likely to come across this side of Elmore Leonard. If it wasn’t for their masterful ability to small talk, so many millions of people would never know what a “Royale with Cheese” is or the etiquette required for a proper foot massage. This breezy ability to ramble almost makes getting “into character,” a shame, because it is all “My name is the Lord” this and “Did I break your concentration” that. Then again, that’s amazing too. This pairing is so ubiquitous with pop culture that it is hard to imagine that in 1994, Jackson was primarily known (if at all) as a great character actor who appeared most recently in Jurassic Park, and Travolta was a has-been who’d last been seen in Look Who’s Talking Now. Afterwards, nobody can think of the Book of Ezekiel without quoting Jackson’s liberal adaptation of it or take a bite of a hamburger without saying, “Hmmm, this is a tasty burger.” If only Vincent had noticed Jules’ miracle.

Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Based loosely on actual historical outlaws, The real Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are entirely defined by this endlessly brilliant anti-Western that saw the first meeting of Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Butch (Newman) is a wise and seasoned outlaw whose relationship with the strangely cocky Sundance Kid (Redford) defined their Hole in the Wall Gang and movie bromances for at least a generation. Sundance’s relationship with the Katharine Ross teacher may not have been built to last, but his friendship with Butch went right to the bitter end of freeze framed glory in Bolivia. They may have never seen Australia, but we’d see Newman and Redford team again in the even more enjoyable The Sting a few years later.

Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains in Casablanca (1942)

While their purposes may have only been fully simpatico for the ending of this masterpiece in American cinema, there is still never one second onscreen where this pairing of American noir and English civility is anything short of captivating. Bogie is Rick Blaine, a bitter freedom fighter who is now fighting the urge not to drown at the bottom of a glass. Rains is Capt. Louis Renault, a bureaucrat so corrupt that he allows his anti-Nazi prisoners to have mysterious accidents while chiding Rick for his obvious sentimentality. An American and a French officer trapped in a Moroccan city not-so-secretly controlled by the Nazis? The only thing they should have in common is their unending ability to deliver one amazing quip after another. “I came to Casablanca for the waters;” “I’m shocked, shocked that there’s gambling going on here;” “I think this the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” The last of those cements their complete team-up to fight behind enemy lines in World War II with one of the best final scenes in movie history. The Nazis never stood a chance.

Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot (1959)

At first glance, there will undoubtedly be some disagreement about the badassery on display when Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis dress up as women to hide from the mob. But think about it for a minute: this lowly pair of musicians witnessed the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and lived to tell the tale. That takes guts, as well as brains to know when to regroup for a later date. Eventually, they face their Mafioso fears and come out on top while also, in Curtis’ case, being able to seduce Marilyn Monroe…in drag. If that isn’t badass, I don’t know what is.

Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear in The Matador (2005)

While on the subject of hilariously bizarre team-ups, none was more unlikely, or strangely cool, than when Pierce Brosnan’s crass hitman named Julian Noble crossed paths with Greg Kinnear, playing seemingly vanilla salesman Danny Wright. In other words, a hitman and a salesman walk into a Mexico City hotel bar…it sounds like the beginning of a long joke, which is the perfect description for this sweetly macabre comedy about people. Brosnan gives the performance of his career in this complete subversion and mockery of the James Bond persona while Kinnear finds surprising depth and pathos in his middle-of-the-road character, particularly when audiences really meet his wife Bean (Hope Davis) halfway through the picture. Proving that committing murder can be a good time, even therapeutic, this is a buddy film with high rewatchability, discovering something even better to be found in Mexico than the margaritas.

Sean Connery and Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

But the best James Bond of all had an even more fitting team-up when he and Harry Palmer went to India in The Man Who Would Be King. As Danny and Peachy, Sean Connery and Michael Caine play Rudyard Kipling’s presumptuous imperialists who turn soldiers of fortune in India, and eventually become wayward gods for a brief time. It is hard to say who deification ended worse for, but the image of Connery and Caine onscreen together as two Brits literally lording it over one of the colonies perfectly captures and satirizes Kipling during a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era of cynicism. Plus, in another life, it is easy to imagine that all of Caine and Connery’s characters traded barbs in bright red uniforms while riding into battle!

Jeff Bridges and John Goodman in The Big Lebowski (1998)

They may not look like much, but Maude Lebowski and Walter Sobchak know a little something, and that’s you just don’t urinate on another man’s rug! When a case of mistaken identity costs the Dude (Jeff Bridges) a perfectly good rug, Lebowski enlists his bowling buddies, particularly big Walter (Goodman) into helping him seek restitution. This being a 1990s Coen Brothers movie, it inevitably turns into a kidnapping storyline where things get a little bit intense, but if you want to bowl in the game of life, you got to be ready to end up in the gutter. Luckily, this movie is a strike.

Jean Reno and Natalie Portman in Léon (1994)

This list is supposed to function as a collection of unlikely “buddy” pairings that left fans clamoring for another team-up. So put preconceptions aside for a team-up so awesome that to this day it still marks Luc Besson’s best film: Léon. When little 12-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman) comes home one day to see her entire family, and most tragically her four-year-old brother, slaughtered by corrupt DEA thugs led by a scene-devouring Gary Oldman, she makes the smart play by pretending she’s the daughter of her fastidious, Italian (yet French sounding?) neighbor, Léon. The fact that he turned out to be a hitman is only a bonus. For those who have seen the superior European version of this movie, they know Léon and Mathilda make a deadly combination as they cut a violent streak through the New York underworld where Mathilda sets them up and Léon knocks them down. It is such an odd, gallows humor scenario that to this day Portman is still asked if she will reprise the role of the precocious girl who chewed gum while watching Reno drop one scum bucket after another.

Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles (1974)

Yet no pairing was more satisfying as when the Waco Kid woke up from his cell to discover that the new sheriff of Rock Ridge…was near. A story of redemption, friendship, and schnitzengruben, Cleavon Little’s Sheriff Bart brings justice to the West when he teams with the Waco Kid to bring down a corrupt railroad mogul named Hedy Lamarr Hedley Lamarr. It is a friendship that transcended small-minded barriers of the era, and even carried those prejudices kicking and screaming into the future, and also into “The French Mistake.” It’s still a timeless team-up that will have any viewer applauding all the way through that limo ride into the sunset.

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