Just 21-years-old when his first feature film was released, Eddie Murphy had already dominated the stand-up comedy circuit and had single-handedly kept Saturday Night Live afloat on television. By the time Hollywood came calling, it seemed like nothing could stop his star from rising. Unlike other SNL alumni, Murphy chose to launch his movie career not with a traditional comedy, but rather with the action-packed cop thriller 48 Hrs. This proved to be a savvy decision that would make him one of the decade’s most bankable stars.

While 48 Hrs. is a rightly remembered as a funny movie with plenty of opportunity for Murphy to show off his comedic chops, it isn’t a straight comedy with jokes and punchlines. The humor flows out of the character and situations. Pulling off a co-lead role in this type of movie for his very first film outing demonstrated that Murphy had range as an actor beyond just telling jokes and doing silly impressions (something he would overly rely on in later years). This film’s success led directly to Murphy being able to headline the stratospheric blockbuster Beverly Hills Cop just two years later.

Title:	48 Hrs.
Year of Release:	1982
Director:	Walter Hill
Watched On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Available On:	Blu-ray Paramount+ Various VOD purchase and rental platforms

Unlike many of his later movies, 48 Hrs. didn’t start out explicitly as a vehicle for Eddie Murphy. The film began development in the mid-1970s as a potential project for Clint Eastwood and possibly Richard Pryor. When those plans went nowhere, the script was retooled a number of times until Nick Nolte was cast in the lead. Director Walter Hill (The Long Riders, Southern Comfort) wanted the humor in the film to have an improvisational feel, and looked at Murphy to costar on the recommendation of his then-girlfriend (later wife), who was the comedian’s talent agent at the time.

The story opens with a prison break, in which hardened psycho Albert Ganz (James Remar) kills a bunch of guards and makes his way to San Francisco, whereupon he also murders a couple cops (including future Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Jonathan Banks). Crusty SFPD detective Jack Cates (Nolte) has a personal stake in catching or killing Ganz as quickly as possible. Doing so will require the assistance of prison inmate Reggie Hammond (Murphy), a thief serving time for armed robbery, who’d worked on Ganz’s crew and might know how to track him down. Reggie has no love for Ganz, and agrees to help, but only on the condition that Jack spring him from the slammer on a 48-hour release so he can search with him – and maybe find time for some personal business while they’re at it.

48 Hrs. is essentially a buddy movie in which the characters are decidedly not buddies, at least not at first. Jack and Reggie have a deeply antagonistic relationship, fueled in no small part by Jack’s overt racism – some of which he may just be putting on for show to intimidate the convict, but some of which is probably genuine. As he tells Reggie in one of the film’s signature pieces of dialogue: “We ain’t partners, we ain’t brothers, and we ain’t friends.” He also repeatedly reminds Reggie, “I own your ass,” which is a pretty loaded statement for a white man to say to a Black man.

Having put up with bullshit like this his entire life, Reggie brushes most of it off. But when Jack loosens the reins and allows him to impersonate a cop in order to roust a redneck bar, Reggie upturns the entire racial dynamic of the story, enough to impress even Jack. The centerpiece of the film, the scene was obviously written as a crowd-pleaser, and probably would have worked with Richard Pryor (or Gregory Hines, who’d also been considered) delivering it, but Eddie Murphy truly steps up and owns the screen in that moment, proving himself indisputably a movie star.

Like most of Hill’s filmography, 48 Hrs. is a very muscular, hard-edged picture. The action is violent and brutal, and most of the dialogue profane. The plot is fairly straightforward, and moves swiftly and efficiently with no flab weighing it down. More than four decades later, it’s still a crackerjack thriller with some great character work and charismatic performances from both leads.

However, anyone watching today should note that, in addition to the bracing racist language, which is a deliberate theme written with intention, the men are also very sexist, and the movie treats its female characters terribly. Casual homophobic slurs in the dialogue have also not aged well at all. Those parts don’t seem to have much purpose beyond being a reflection of the state of cinema and culture in 1982.

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Paramount first released 48 Hrs. on Blu-ray back in 2011 with an adequate if unimpressive disc. A decade later, the studio remastered the film for a reissue under the “Paramount Presents” banner in 2021, followed by a 4K Ultra HD edition in 2022. The latter came in a couple different options, packaged either individually or bundled in a 2-Movie Collection (the version I own) with the sequel Another 48 Hrs.

Paramount has an uneven track record for the quality of its 4K remasters, to put it lightly. Ever since this 4K edition was released, I’d heard numerous complaints about 48 Hrs. being one of the studio’s most egregious examples of overzealous grain management and other digital processing. With that in mind, I braced for the worst before watching it. Perhaps as a consequence of setting my expectations about as low as they could go, I was relieved to find the disc, if definitely problematic, at least more watchable than I’d been led to believe.

Make no mistake, however, the disc has issues. Right from the start, the opening credits are a total mess due to some unwise combination of Digital Noise Reduction and artificial sharpening. Grain on screen looks harsh, ugly, and blocky, while the imagery behind the credit text has a smoothed-over, almost oily appearance. The rest of the movie afterward doesn’t look quite as bad as that, but the transfer is highly inconsistent from scene to scene, with some having a reasonable amount of film grain, and others looking digitally degrained and/or sharpened. Even when grain is present, it often exhibits weird and unnatural textures.

I don’t have the ability to take 4K screenshots on my computer, so all images on this page compare the 2011 Blu-ray against the 2022 Blu-ray copy that came in the case with the 4K disc (and which I assume is identical to the 2021 Paramount Presents Blu-ray). If anything, the lower resolution of the standard Blu-ray format evens out some of the problems that stand out in sharper relief in 4K. For that reason, the Blu-ray may be less distracting to watch in some respects.

The new master is letterboxed to 1.85:1 and has more picture information on all four sides of the frame compared to the 2011 Blu-ray, which was slightly zoomed-in. Despite the digital processing, the image is also generally a small bit sharper and better resolved – more so on the 4K disc than the new Blu-ray – but the difference isn’t dramatic. Colors look naturalistic, if not particularly flashy, and pull back a small blue shift from the old transfer. Any sense of HDR is very subtly applied, but neon lighting late in the movie in suitably vivid.

I’m not thrilled with all the choices Paramount made here, but on the scale of all the video transfer screw-ups I’ve ever seen in my twentysomething-year career reviewing home media, this one isn’t nearly as bad as it might have been. I can’t fully excuse it, but it does rate a pass from me.

The soundtrack is only offered in Dolby TrueHD 5.1 format with no option representing the film’s original Dolby Stereo mix. However, as far as remixes go, this one is very restrained and remains heavily balanced toward the front channels. The James Horner score has nice breadth and body, and gunshots are loud and booming.

The 4K disc has no bonus features. The limited extras are all found on the Blu-ray disc. These consist of a 19-minute interview with director Walter Hill, a vintage trailer, and the full 5-minute Space Kid 1966 animated short that one of the characters is briefly seen watching during the movie.

Related

• Another 48 Hrs. (1990)
• Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the standard Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.