Hollywood has made hundreds of hyper-violent cop buddy pics at this point by 2019. Some well-known and high-grossing, if mostly intellectually bereft.
there are all sorts of combos:
Black cop/racist Aussie midget.
Black cop/Asian martial artist.
White cop/black convict.
etc.
All full of pointless shooting and stupid wisecracks. And cartoonish bad guys.
Freebie and the Bean is sort of a prototype early version, where you see the template but Hollywood hadn't quite perfected the formula. Being in a new genre, Caan and Arkin don't really know what they're doing. They have almost zero chemistry. And their methods make Det. Harry Callahan look like a school resource officer.
