Can anyone explain why, in the movies, The Chief of Police always suspends his star detective or gives them 48 hours to solve a crime?
Is this some sort of motivational technique or a time-management approach that the rest of the world has not spotted yet?
Please repeat after me – It Is A Plot Device.
Else, the movie or whatever would last two weeks to six months, involve a whole lot of files, doughnut eating and claims of police brutality, and either bore you to death or involve you as a suspect.
I can’t speak for all movies. However, to the extent that “48 Hours” is sui generis, the reason that the captain gives Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) forty-eight hours is that Jack is more or less illegally taking Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy) out of prison to help him track down Luther Harris (David Patrick Kelly). Jack had asked to be “left alone on this one” because the dead cop in the hotel was “killed with [his] gun.”
It wasn’t management motivational techniques, in other words, but the boss cop trying to lessen the possibility of further disaster arising from the use of a convicted, imprisoned felon to help catch an escaped felon.
- Rick
And here I thought this thread was going to be about Chief O’Hara, the hopelessly inept head of the Gotham city police. That fool couldn’t catch a jaywalker, much less a super-villian.
I thought it was going to be about Tim O’Hara losing his job at the paper, and coming home and “borrowing” Uncle Martin’s Time Machine to go back and set things right.
I was going to go with Kimball O’Hara, of the Royal Geological Survey in India. As I recall, one summer he was blown halfway across the bazaar by a store of fireworks…
I was thinking it had to do with that revisionist version of “Gone with the Wind” that’s coming out, that replaces Scarlett O’Hara with her mulatto sister Cinnamon. (I’m not kidding!)
Wow! I just thought that all Chiefs of Police were called O’Hara