25 Funniest Buddy Cop Movies
Before they crack the case... they’ll crack a few jokes
The Heat (2013)
The Buddy Cops: Detective Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy), the kind of cop who keeps her fridge stocked with an arsenal of weapons, is forced to team up with the anal-retentive FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashland (Sandra Bullock) who has one way of doing things: in Spanx.
Funniest Moment: Rushing to the aid of a diner patron, choking on his food, Ashland performs an emergency tracheotomy - unnecessarily. Slicing open his throat to insert a straw, Mullins wretches at the gushes spouting from the wound while Ashland screams “There’s so much blood!”
Super Troopers (2001)
The Buddy Cops: Vermont’s crew of slack state troopers; Thorny (Jay Chandrasekhar), Mac (Steve Lemme), Rabbit (Erik Stolhanske), John Foster (Paul Soter) and Farva (Kevin Heffernan), these guys’d just as happily roll up a doobie with perps than slap cuffs on ‘em.
Funniest Moment: To relieve the daily tedium, Thorny and Rabbit pull over a carful of paranoid stoners and proceed to scare seven shades out of them. The best gag is saved for new recruit Rabbit, who attempts to insert the word “meow” into every sentence without being detected.
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
The Buddy Cops: Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), a Detroit detective who favours a four-letter-word vocabulary, hightails it to Beverly Hills in pursuit of his best buddy’s murderer. Detective Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Sgt. John Taggart (John Ashton) are two strait-laced cops who befriend him. Reluctantly.
Funniest Moment: While Rosewood and Taggart are staking out their new comrade outside his hotel, Foley spots their car by the kerb. Foiling their ruse, he sends down a platter of food from the hotel’s swanky room service to stall them as he hurtles away laughing in his beat-up Chevy.
The punchline? Three bananas shoved up their tailpipe preventing them from a hot pursuit.
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Lethal Weapon (1987)
The Buddy Cops: Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is the young cop who won’t let pride get in the way of a buoyant mullet. Murtaugh (Danny Glover) is the cranky veteran he’s paired with who won’t let anything lie.
Funniest Moment: In a throwaway line we’d all like to use (if we weren’t so busy writing) after apprehending a criminal, Murtaugh asks his partner to confirm their suspect is DEFINITELY the guy.
Riggs’ response? “Yeah I’m sure man, I never forget an asshole.”
Hot Fuzz (2007)
The Buddy Cops: A mismatched pair of cops battling evil (swans, ex-Bond villains, etc.) in a seemingly-quaint English town. Uptight big city copper, Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) relocates to Sandford to find himself partnered up with the incompetent Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) .
Funniest Moment: Riotously sending up the action genre, in homage to their holy grail - Point Break - the pair cut loose for the slickest, most beautifully-shot car chase ever. That comes to an end two seconds later.
Gem Seddon is GamesRadar+'s west coast Entertainment News Reporter, working to keep all of you updated on all of the latest and greatest movies and shows on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Outside of entertainment journalism, Gem can frequently be found writing about the alternative health and wellness industry, and obsessing over all things Aliens and Terminator on Twitter.