The 'interracial buddy movie' is back in the shape of US hit, Cop Out but what does the genre reveal about changing attitudes to racism

• Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis play police partners Hodges and Monroe in Cop Out. Picture: Complimentary

That 1982 hit, in which a gruff white detective partners a smooth-talking black convict to hunt down a killer, transformed a young comedian-turned-actor named Eddie Murphy into a Hollywood megastar and gave wings to a cinematic tradition as emblematic of the 1980s multiplex as John Hughes's teenage dramedies: the inter-racial buddy-cop movie.

Among the hordes of teenage boys who flocked to 48 Hrs was the comedian-turned-actor Tracy Morgan. "I loved it. You've got these two guys alone in this cop car, sharing their lives despite their differences," recalls Morgan, the 30 Rock star and former Saturday Night Live cast member. "I grew up watching 48 Hrs, Lethal Weapon and all of those movies, and I always wanted to be in one of them."

With his new film he has finally got his wish. Cop Out stars Morgan as a Brooklyn detective, with Bruce Willis as his partner. The movie is a throwback to the heyday of Murphy-Nolte, Glover-Gibson and the rainbow coalition of wisecracking, scum-busting partnerships that followed close behind, including Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal in Running Scared.

The inter-racial buddy-cop movie (in which, it bears noting, the buddies aren't always police officers, but are always crimefighters) was a 1980s bumper crop, but it has outlived the decade. 48 Hrs gave way to a stream of riffs and re-imaginings that included Another 48 Hrs, The Last Boy Scout, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Men in Black, Rush Hour and Training Day. Cop Out, however, was intended as a homage to the genre as it existed in its classic incarnation.

"I wanted to go for the same vibe that Running Scared or Beverly Hills Cop had, where there's a real sense of danger, but you still get to make the funny," says Kevin Smith, the film's director. "I tell people this movie is like Lethal Weapon, only with 60 per cent less action." To nail the retro ambience, Smith even hired Harold Faltermeyer, the composer of the Beverly Hills Cop theme, to write a synthesiser-heavy score.

If the inter-racial buddy-cop movie has proven itself long lasting, it owes much of this resilience to its relationship to social concerns. The genre has allowed filmmakers to confront race relations issues but in a rock-'em, sock-'em context low on speechifying and high on car chases.

This was true of perhaps the first inter-racial buddy-cop movie to speak of, Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night. That 1967 murder mystery – which brought together Sidney Poitier as an ace Philadelphia homicide detective and Rod Steiger as a backwoods Mississippi sheriff – is an attack on Southern bigotry and an ode to racial co-operation.

In an interview several years ago, Jewison said his hope for the film was that white audiences would experience "the relationship between white and black in the South", stressing that, for this to work, the subject "had to be confronted in a very entertaining and theatrical way".

In the Heat of the Night is a high-minded sort of thriller, but it shares its basic plot with many of the flashier action vehicles that succeeded it: after initial hostility, a black man and a white man gradually work past their differences to focus on the greater good. Sometimes the racial tension between them is explicit, as in 48 Hrs, in which Nick Nolte's Jack subjects Murphy's Reggie to a barrage of nasty slurs. Sometimes that tension is more diffuse, or shades into broader anxieties about age or class, as in the Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop films.

Racism also figures overtly in 1989's Lethal Weapon 2, as an obstacle that unites, rather than divides the partnership of Mel Gibson's Riggs and Danny Glover's Murtaugh. The villains of the film are pasty-faced avatars of intolerance: diplomats from apartheid-era South Africa. Of course relations between the police and the black residents were hardly utopian in late-80s Los Angeles – a city just a few years shy of the Rodney King attack and the 1992 riots.

"The movie's a sort of wish fulfilment," says the screenwriter Shane Black, who created the Lethal Weapon franchise and wrote The Last Boy Scout. "In a troubled ethnic climate, a movie where black and white work together with nothing but mutual respect? I think it pointed to a better future." A fourth Lethal Weapon sequel has been rumoured, but, Black says, "with near-complete certainty, it's not happening".

Melvin Donalson, author of Masculinity in the Inter-racial Buddy Film, is more ambivalent about the genre's politics. Inter-racial buddy-cop movies were a leap forward from earlier silver screen black-and-white pairings – Will Rogers and Stepin Fetchit, say, or Jack Benny and Eddie (Rochester) Anderson – in which, Donalson says, "the black character serves mostly to enhance the white one". But, he adds, movies like 48 Hrs tend to treat racial tension as something that can be simply worked through and overcome, an interpersonal problem rather than an entrenched institutional one. "As cops," he says, "the black and white characters fight for and validate a system that, for all intents and purposes, works."

Donalson also sees the genre tied to a broader backlash against feminist upheavals of the era, being a brawny bloc of movies where men could be men and women hardly figured. To him, inter-racial buddy-cop films put a multicultural face on traditional notions about gender, "affirming that whether you're a black man, white man, Asian man or Latino man, you're still the person who should be in charge". The films also represented the rising commercial viability of black actors in the 1980s.

Danny Glover says he was drawn to Murtaugh largely because he hadn't seen many black characters like him on screen before. "He has his own career, his own life and a stable nuclear family with universal, middle-class aspirations," he says. "That was attractive to me, because that's the kind of family I came from."

In Cop Out there is no racial tension between Tracy Morgan's Paul and Bruce Willis's Jimmy. When the movie begins, they have been partners for nine years, and they behave more like a married couple than wary work partners. "They can't see that one's bald and one's black," says Robb Cullen, who wrote the film with his brother Mark. "We never came at it as, 'This is a black-and-white movie'."

As it happens, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg were initially attached to star in Cop Out. (The two walked away after a disagreement over pay, and their own buddy-cop revamp, The Other Guys, will be released later this year.) Tracy Morgan, who often explores and explodes black stereotypes in his comedy, says he did "a little ad-libbing" to tailor Paul to himself, but that otherwise the role is identical to the one Ferrell was offered.

Mark Cullen says Cop Out was the interracial buddy-cop movie given a post-racial makeover – a film in which the "bromance" is colourblind. "The way we looked at it," he says, "we were just writing a romantic comedy for two guys."

Cop Out is released in the UK later this year. copoutmovie.warnerbros.com