Another 48 Hrs movie review & film summary (1990)
Watching the movie, I was trying to remember the details of the 1982 film. In that one, Nolte was on the trail of some cop killers and he sprung Hammond from prison for 48 hours to help him out. They turned into quite a team - the hung-over white cop and the confident young black man, both suspicious of each other, both learning to be friends.
The movie contained the scene that made Murphy into a star, a scene where he walked into a redneck bar, impersonated a police officer, and intimidated everyone with the sheer force of his personality.
In "Another 48 HRS," years have passed. Cates has stopped drinking (and also apparently lost his long-suffering girlfriend). Hammond is back in prison, but Cates is holding $475,000 for him, for when he gets out. Meanwhile, in a shoot-out during a motorcycle race, Cates kills a man who fired at him. But the other guy's gun disappears, and with no evidence apart from Cates' troublesome personnel record, his badge is lifted and he's charged with manslaughter.
Meanwhile, there is a bunch of long-haired, leather-jacketed, tattooed motorcycle gang members who cruise the desert blowing people away. They apparently work for someone who works for the Iceman. They want Hammond dead - so badly that they try to kill him by opening fire on the prison bus that's returning him to civilization. You might ask why the bus driver couldn't simply push them off the road during the high-speed chase, but that would be too logical a question for this movie, which specializes in confusing and endless action scenes.
There's one crucial difference between this movie and the original: We never get much of an idea of the friendship and camaraderie between Hammond and Cates. Their idea of friendship boils down to hitting each other as hard as they can, "to even the score." They have no dialogue scenes together of any depth. The plot they're in is so confusing that at one point they simply go back to the prison and ask a long-timer (Bernie Casey) to identify the guy they're after. He gives them the man's name and address. How does he know all this stuff? Don't even ask.
