10 Movies That Wanted You To HATE The Hero
3. Jack Cates - 48 Hrs.
48 Hrs. is a movie that probably couldn't get made today - or at least, not with the same throughline.
That's because its focal "hero," San Francisco Police Inspector Jack Cates (Nick Nolte), is such a card-carrying piece of human garbage.
Where to begin? Cates is a blatantly power-drunk cop who will "bend" the law to make his life easier wherever possible, and shortly after reluctantly teaming with criminal Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy), starts making racist epithets like his life depends on it.
He's a prototypical example of the "loose canon" cop prominent featured in action and crime movies throughout the 1970s and 1980s in particular.
And really the only reason Cates isn't a completely lost cause is that he's paired with an entertaining Black foil who can bring him back down to Earth.
Though Cates does apologise to Reggie for his remarks later in the film, Reggie crucially doesn't let him all the way off the hook, retorting, "Doing your job don't explain everything, Jack."
It's the buddy cop dynamic between Jack and Reggie which makes the film work, no matter that by any metric - and especially contemporary scrutiny - Jack is a deeply awful person.