Another 48 Hrs. (1990)
★★½ — Another 48 Hrs. (1990)
There's a particular kind of disappointment reserved for sequels that get the band back together and then forget why anyone cared in the first place. Another 48 Hrs. is exactly that kind of film. Walter Hill, Nick Nolte, Eddie Murphy, eight years on, and somehow the sum is considerably less than its parts. You walk away grateful, oddly, for the original, because revisiting what made it work throws the failures here into sharp relief.
When I reviewed 48 Hrs. (1982), what struck me most was the friction. The tension between Nolte's Jack Cates and Murphy's Reggie Hammond felt genuinely charged, the racial sparring uncomfortable in a way that was pointed and alive. The comedy came from real antagonism. Here, that edge has been sanded down. The barbs are still there, but they land like photocopies of photocopies, faded, familiar, lacking the subversive sting that once gave the partnership its dangerous energy. You can feel everyone going through the motions of a dynamic they've long since stopped interrogating.
Murphy himself remains magnetic. That's not nothing. There are moments, a piece of banter here, a flash of that elastic charisma there, where you glimpse the old magic and think it might catch. But Nolte's Cates has calcified into a cliché. He growls. He scowls. He breaks rules and gets dressed down by his superiors and then breaks more rules. There's nothing behind the silhouette. Whatever complexity the character once carried has been traded in for the shorthand of the grizzled movie cop, and Nolte seems to know it.
The action does its job. Hill knows how to stage chaos and he shoots it with confidence. Car chases have momentum, shootouts have crunch, and the bar brawls are staged with the kind of gleeful destructiveness that makes you wonder if the prop department had a standing arrangement with a glazier. Honestly, the sheer volume of shattered glass on display is almost impressive in its own right. But kinetic energy isn't the same as tension, and spectacle without stakes grows hollow fast.
The soundtrack is another odd mismatch. Hill has always had a strong instinct for music, it's part of what makes something like The Warriors (1979) feel so completely itself. Here, the musical choices often feel disconnected from what's on screen, as though the film couldn't quite decide what it wanted to be and the score is stuck between competing visions. That identity crisis runs through everything. It reaches for grit, then pivots to comedy, then tries for slick thriller cool, and never commits long enough to any one register to make it stick.
This is a director whose filmography I genuinely admire. The lean, stripped-back efficiency of his best work, the way he builds worlds with atmosphere rather than exposition, is something I keep coming back to. Which makes a misfire like this sting more than it might from a lesser filmmaker. The pieces are here. The talent is here. And yet the film never finds its reason to exist beyond the commercial logic of a successful predecessor.
There's fun to be had if you're in a forgiving mood and you want to watch two charismatic men shout at each other while things explode around them. I won't pretend I was entirely bored. But as a follow-up to one of the sharpest buddy cop films ever made, it's a hollow echo, louder than the original and far less interesting.
Two and a half stars.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1990 | Watched: 2026-04-01
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Walter Hill: 48 Hrs. (1982) · The Driver (1978) · The Warriors (1979)
More with Eddie Murphy: Beverly Hills Cop (1984) · 48 Hrs. (1982) · Mulan (1998) · Shrek 2 (2004)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
