SURELY THERE IS much sociology to be done on the buddy-cop movie. So far as my informal, non-academic training can pinpoint it, the buddy-cop genre crawled out of the primordial celluloid soup in the early 1980s with the seminal Eddie Murphy / Nick Nolte film “48 Hrs.”

A gigantic hit, “48 Hrs.” spawned the usual cavalcade of imitators, each following the same basic formula: Two men of differing temperaments and backgrounds are thrown together by circumstance and must learn to work together in order to solve the murder/expose the crooked police chief/save the world/etc. By the end of the adventure these unlikely partners are the best of friends and one of them, usually the rakish, wild one, has gotten the girl. Most of the time, both leads are cops, although occasionally one of the partners is a good-hearted crook or an eccentric civilian.