10 Unlikely Movie Team-Ups You Completely Forgot Happened

The premise sounds like a spoof: Bob Hoskins and Denzel Washington play a racist cop and a streetsmart lawyer respectively. When the former suffers a heart attack and the latter is gunned down, Hoskins awakes from surgery to learn that he has been given the heart of his erstwhile rival - whose ghost now naturally follows him around, cracking wise.

Heart Condition’s major mistake (other than its premise and dreadful title) is that it fancies itself as a quite serious piece, taking a deep look into the USA’s culture of prostitution. The film’s main baddie is a remarkably brutal pimp - good on them for not flinching away from reality, but maybe do that in a film that isn’t about a ghost?

There’s comedy, too, mostly deriving from the fact that one of the actors (Bob Hoskins) is white, while the other (Denzel Washington) is black. The cultural observations derived from this seem a little stale in 1990, let alone 2020.

Hoskins and Washington are actors of the finest calibre, and they work perfectly well together here, but both must have found the experience baffling. Denzel would win his first Oscar not long after Heart Condition’s release - not especially relevant, just weird.