Armed and Dangerous (1986)

A 1986 action comedy directed by mark l. lester, starring john candy and eugene levy as a disgraced cop and an inept lawyer who become armed security guards and stumble into a union pension heist. harold ramis co-wrote the script with peter torokvei from a story by brian grazer, ramis, and james keach. meg ryan, robert loggia, and kenneth mcmillan round out the cast.

What the film does

Frank dooley is an lapd officer framed for stealing a television by corrupt detectives and dismissed from the force. norman kane is a defense attorney so incompetent that his client threatens to kill him if he loses the case; kane confesses his uselessness to the judge and resigns. the two meet at guard dog security, where they are licensed after a single afternoon of training and assigned as partners.

on their first night guarding a pharmaceutical warehouse, the pair are ordered to take a lunch break by a senior guard. during that break, the warehouse is robbed. dooley and kane are blamed. they attend a union meeting where kane, reverting to lawyer mode, questions union president michael carlino about how four million dollars in annual dues are spent. carlino threatens kane and the pair are reassigned to a landfill and a toxic waste dump.

they piece together that carlino is using the pension fund to finance a drug cartel and plans to have an armored car full of cash robbed, with insurance covering the loss. after the union treasurer is murdered to keep him quiet, dooley, kane, and maggie cavanaugh (meg ryan), their supervisor and the daughter of the guard dog owner, team up to stop the heist. the climax is a chase through la traffic with maggie driving the armored car, dooley racing on a motorcycle, and kane clinging to the side of a truck.

Why it is in the canon

This is a live-action looney tunes cartoon. candy wraps his fists in boxing gloves and rivets them full of bolts before a fight. levy cross-examines a union boss with the same rhythm he used in the sctv lawyer sketches. the plot engine is union pension fraud, which no other buddy comedy has ever used as a macguffin. the film was a box office disappointment in 1986, but it captures something that later candy-levy vehicles do not: the sense that both men are actually trying, that the world has kicked them down and they have decided to be ridiculous about it rather than bitter. lester made this between commando and firestarter sequels, and the action beats have real weight, but the comedy is what holds it together.