Another 48 Hrs.

Another 48 Hrs.

You know how dreams sometimes are you see familiar places and faces come in and out of focus, but you can’t figure out how they fit together? “Another 48 HRS” is like that. The outlines look familiar from the first movie, “48 HRS,” and the villains and cops are all basic movie stereotypes. But what’s going on here? Everybody seems to be looking for the Iceman. The Iceman is the criminal mastermind of drug traffic in the San Francisco Bay area. A cop named Cates (Nick Nolte) has been after him for years every time he gets close, the Iceman slips away.

Meanwhile, a convict named Hammond (Eddie Murphy) is about to be released from prison. Maybe he knows who the Iceman is. Maybe he can help Cates then again maybe he can’t.

he doesn’t want to. Watching this movie, I wasn’t trying to remember particulars of its 1982 predecessor so much as just get something straight in my mind about these two characters played by Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. In that one, Nolte sprung him from jail for 48 hours so they could nail some cop killers together; they made a great team hung-over white cop and confident young black man, both suspicious of each other at first, gradually learning to be friends.

“Another 48 HRS.” takes up their story several years after those events; Cates has stopped drinking (and also apparently lost his long-suffering girlfriend), Hammond’s back in stir but Cates has $475,000 for him when he gets out of this latest jam; meanwhile Cates gets into a shooting during a motorcycle race and kills another driver who fired at him only later does it appear that nobody else saw any other guy with a gun there was no other guy with a gun so based on Cates’ personnel record and the fact that there was no other guy with a gun at the scene of the crime, his badge is lifted and he’s charged with manslaughter.

Meanwhile, there’s a gang of longhairs in leather jackets and tattoos who ride around the desert messing people up. They work for somebody who works for the Iceman. They want Hammond dead so bad they open 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 this high-speed chase, but that would be too logical a question for this movie, which consists mostly of action scenes it hopelessly muddles.

In addition to being confused by what are supposed to be plot points (and failing to see how they’re connected), I had one major problem with “Another 48 HRS.” It isn’t funny. The first film represented Eddie Murphy’s entry into superstar comedy status; it contained one of those scenes where everybody in the audience laughed as if on cue; until then nobody knew this guy was so funny. The scene showed Murphy walking into a redneck bar, impersonating a police officer and intimidating everyone with sheer force of personality alone. This time, though nothing.

There are several extended sequences in which Murphy goes through bizarrely theatrical routines suggesting his paranoia or alcohol abuse talk about shooting fish in a barrel. I also felt shortchanged by Nolte’s character. We never get much idea of Nolte’s character at all. There are some fairly random shots at providing him with motivation he loved her but lost her but we never sense how completely consumed he is by loneliness and failure.

We never get any sense of how badly Murphy wants out from under his life sentence or what makes him tick or whether he even has enough brains to know what makes him tick. All we really care about in movies like this is action anyway: Does it deliver? Well, let’s see. A hotel blows up. A police car blows up (a good one). A motorcycle blows up. Somebody gets shot in the knee and then shot in the other knee; somebody else gets their nose and ears shot off at close range.

I don’t know how these people keep track of which body part is missing from which person, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with Nolte hitting Murphy so hard that now he can only walk sideways. Yes, there’s a lot of action in “Another 48 HRS.” But how much do we care about who lives or dies when we never even got enough time with Hammond and Cates to understand what the hell they mean to each other?

Meanwhile in the police headquarters, the cop plot is recycled from many other movies. How many times do we have to watch that scene where the Internal Affairs guy makes the hero hand over his badge and gun. Never mind all other movies, this is Nike Nolte’s second time through this scene in a couple of months (after “Q & A”). And when they finally reveal who the Iceman really is, ask yourself: Would the drug kingpin of Northern California need to keep a day job? Walter Hill directed “Another 48 HRS” as well as.

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