A police detective named Benny Avalon (Bubba Smith) and an FBI agent named Joe Jennings (Beau Bridges) are assigned to work together to take down a drug dealer named Ivory Jones (Raymond St. Jacques).  Avalon and Jennings don’t immediately get along.  Avalon is tough and streetwise while Joe is a good example of what used to be called a yuppie.  When they discover that Ivory is connected to a white supremacist gang led by Col. Hester (Lloyd Bridges), Avalon and Jennings have to set aside their differences and work together.

The Wild Pair starts out as a standard buddy cop film until things take a sudden serious turn and it instead becomes a violent and blood-soaked revenge thriller.  It tries to mix comedy and action in the style of Beverly Hills Cop but it doesn’t work.  Beverly Hills Cop understood that you could only take the violence so far without losing the laughs.  The Wild Pair has the bad guys killing several innocent (and likable) people and also murdering Avalon’s cat.  Maybe Walter Hill could have pulled off what this film was going for.  He certainly managed to do so with 48 Hours.  But this film was the directorial debut of Beau Bridges, a good actor who, as a director, was no Walter Hill.  As for Bubba Smith, he was always more of a personality than an actor.  That served him well in the Police Academy films but here he’s actually supposed to be playing someone other than Bubba Smith and his limitations of an actor become especially glaring once the film turns serious.  Lloyd Bridges also seems miscast as the villain but that may just be because I’ve watched Airplane! and Hot Shots too many times.

The pair may be wild but they’re also forgettable.