Cinema hasn’t delivered a dynamic duo worth getting off (or onto, depending) your couch for in quite some time.
That’s not to say there haven’t been delightful one-offs, some we earnestly wish we could see again.
Take Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in Shane Black’s 2016 detective comedy The Nice Guys, for example. The connection was clear, the electricity obvious, yet we impatiently wait for a sequel to be greenlit. Some dared to dream that Quentin Tarantino’s swansong might involve another Leonardo DiCaprio-Brad Pitt team-up. Wishful thinking.
Contemporary examples of delightful screen duos are few and far between. Some, especially the Marvel fanboys, will work hard to convince that close friends Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in Deadpool & Wolverine are the perfect refutation to this claim now that it’s taken more than $1bn at the box office, but resurrecting a killed-off character to team up with an already established anti-hero is fraudulent.
Organic duos like the great Paul Newman and the inimitable Robert Redford is a high bar but hardly unattainable. Their partnership (both in Oscar Winning successes), a perceptible frisson lighting up the set for watchers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting.
Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid and Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy were one of the original buddy pairings back in 1969.
It’s hard to avoid the Big C in this elusive search: Chemistry.
Sometimes screen duos are meant to be. Brad Pitt and George Clooney are the closest thing to Newman and Redford, with their readily accessible suave and charisma. Pitt and Clooney first paired up in Ocean’s Eleven in 2001 and would go on to co-star in the truest sense in another pair of sequels — their last outing together was the Coen Brothers’ 2008 spy-comedy Burn After Reading where Clooney’s character Harry accidentally kills Pitt’s Chad in almost slapstick fashion.
Many, including myself, feared that Harry and Chad’s demise would play out in real terms and with ne’er a word of a reunion, that we’d seen the last of the deadly duo. No fear. With Jon Watts’ new comedy, Wolfs, Clooney and Pitt assemble for more wise-cracking and weapon-wielding. The reunion has, unsurprisingly, been embraced with gusto on the Venice Lido, a festival famed for its status as a celebrity hotspot.
Reaching back to find the last pair to stir things up is a challenge. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis? Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill? Ethan Hawke and July Delpy? Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone? Perhaps the latter duo, whose maiden bewitching came in Crazy, Stupid, Love in 2011. They went on to sing and dance their way even further into cinemagoers hearts with La La Land — which also won Stone a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. But that was 2016, nearly nine years ago.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence attempted to revive their chemistry to mixed results in the Bad Boys series. The most recent installation, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, was better than expected, but hands up who wants to see Smith and Lawrence shoot it up on screen for the fifth time? Thought so.
Elsewhere, while real-life friends Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart have shown plenty of chemistry in films including Jumanji, it’s less a marriage of equals so much as Johnson doing the heavy lifting.
After the roaring success of Barbie, a fledgling partnership has emerged in Ryan Gosling (seeing a pattern here?) and Margot Robbie. The pair created truly memorable moments in Greta Gerwig’s dollhouse parable and will reunite for an Ocean’s Eleven prequel that Warner Bros has yet to set a release date for.
Ryan Gosling, left, and Margot Robbie in a scene from Barbie. Picture: Warner Bros. Pictures via AP
What makes a duo dymanic can’t quite be put into words. They have that sense of je ne sais quoi that leaves us begging for more. Think Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Their folly and frustration brought audiences so much glee, and still do many decades later. Pitt and Clooney have it all and it appears that they may be the last great “classic” movie double act.
Without trying to look to the past with rose-tinted glasses, the classic duos had that special fairy dust suspended in the spaces between each other, a certain spark. Pitt and Clooney have only solidified that claim with Wolfs.
