16 of the Best Movie Duos of All Tim

By The Manolith Team on August 17th, 2009

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Some movies put two actors together that just seem to break the boundary between scripted, and naturally perfect chemistry. Whether they’re enemies, friends, family, or partners, the perfect movie duo stands the test of time like little else can. Some go on to make sequels and entire franchises, and others are so good together that they make several movies that aren’t even related in any way. These 16 pairs of jokers, wildmen, ass-kickers and just about everything in between are the best on-screen duos we could find.

Robert Redford and Paul Newman

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Playing in both 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting in 1973, these two became iconic screen-duo legends in the movie business before most of us were in diapers. Strangely enough, in both movies the two played best-buddy criminals, bank-robbing gunfighters in one, and a pair of drifters in the other. Even though the two had never met before their first film pairing, they quickly became lifelong friends off-screen. When Newman Died, Redford told stories about years worth of pranks shared between the two, like delivering wrecked Porsche’s to each other’s houses, just for old time’s sake.

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino

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First, The Godfather Part II brought these two titans together to play father and son in one of the greatest movie franchises ever. Then, in 1995, Heat, a truly epic modern masterpiece, filled theaters with hyper-realistic gunfights and bank-robberies. Pacino and De Niro played the ultimate adversaries in this one, and the movie was gold because of it, even though they only shared one single scene together the whole time. Years of pining and whining finally got them to team up for a partner flick in 2008’s Righteous Kill, letting us see them as friends for the first time in two seriously long, intertwined careers.

Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson

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Willis and Jackson got together for their first serious movie in 1994’s classic Pulp Fiction, though their first actual appearance in the same movie is technically the previous year’s National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon. It would only be another year, in 1995, when the two would really break down walls in Die Hard with a Vengeance, when they played off each other’s unique personalities to make awkwardly hilarious racial situations seem like bonding experiences. Later, in 2000, they go deeper still with their on-screen chemistry. Unbreakable almost totally revamped the way we see superhero/supervillain origin stories, largely due to the way these two seem to fit together so well as friends.

Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller

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Wilson and Stiller have shared an astonishing number of movies together, so many in fact that the two seem inseparable. The really surprising part of all this is that, unlike so many other duos who try for this kind of longevity, they still manage to not only pull it off, but the team is ridiculously successful in everything they do together. Going back as far as The Cable Guy, though not really sharing much screen time until two years later in 1998’s Permanent Midnight (where they played best friends in a dark, rare, non-comedy), this duo now concentrates on pumping out comedies that don’t seem effected by the law of diminishing returns.

Steve Martin and John Candy

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On their own, they’re two of the most beloved icons of the 80’s; together, they spun classic-comedy gold in 1987’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles. They were cast as the ultimately unlikely pair to get stuck together, and it would be extremely difficult to imagine another pair that could have done it better. Martin’s posh, sometimes almost effeminate version of manhood clashed hilariously with Candy’s bean-burrito, beer, and trucker-hat version. More of less, this is what the 80’s were made of.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau

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These two go all the way back to 1966, when they co-starred in The Fortune Cookie. They weren’t even young at that point, already in their 40’s, but they would go on to be life-long friends and co-stars, but it was in their twilight years that they’d really become the world’s favorite crotchety old men in Grumpy Old Men and its later sequel, Grumpier Old Men. Audiences weren’t fooled for a moment into thinking the two hated each other, but they loved to see the tit-for-tat relationship flourish on screen before the two were taken away from the camera for the last time.

Sylvester Stallone and Carl Weathers

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In 1976, Rocky made the world a joggier place for everyone, but it also brought the world what would become the truly massive bro-mance of Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed. The two characters couldn’t have survived long if the two actors didn’t have the chemistry going, and we wouldn’t have beach-shorts montages to laugh at now, or the tear-jerking (don’t lie) scenes of their successes and failures together in the ring -all leading up to the final heartbreaking moment when Creed dies in Rocky’s arms. You’re sad now. Admit it. They were that good.

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence

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Don’t let the fact that the title was an obvious rip from one of the world’s worst songs, or that Michael Bay threw too many explosions in for most physicists’ comfort. Bad Boys made 1995 a year for buddy-movie memory, because Smith and Lawrence were an absolutely perfect match for their roles as best friends and partners. They fit the roles so well, they came back and did it again, some say better, in Bad Boys II eight years later. I won’t lie, I’m probably one of many who would actually get excited at the mention of a Bad Boys III, just to see these two try out some middle-aged shenanigans so many years later.

Wesley Snipes and Kris Kristofferson

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As if hunting vampires with a half-vampire weren’t awesome enough, in 1998 some geniuses filmed Blade, and cast not just Kris Kristofferson as the most grizzled, salty-hard badass to walk around with a limp, but also thew in a Wesley Snipes as his protegé - the half-vampire death-machine with a soft spot for the old man. The unlikely duo became instantly perfect and undeniable. The two went on to star in what would be come a three-part franchise, after brining Kristofferson’s character back to life repeatedly just to keep the team together.

Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes

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These guys are nothing short of best friends both on and off the screen, and it’s more than obvious they’ve spent years of their lives passed out drunk on each others’ floors and/or couches. Anytime the two of them get together for a movie, it’s a cult-classic, and not just because of Smith’s earthy-hilarious writing ability, either. They play off one another so well that they’re often just thought of and described as a single unit, and usually by their most memorable character names Jay and Silent Bob, hetero life-partners.

Brad Pitt and George Clooney

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Nobody really expected these two to hook up the way they did, but it happened, and we’re all lucky for it. In what seemed like a perfect opportunity for two heavy-hitters in Hollywood to butt heads, instead the pair became fast friends. Since Ocean’s 11, they’ve played in three more films, finishing off the Ocean’s franchise and then meeting up with a huge cast in Burn After Reading just last year. When they get together, they’re unique in that they actually manage to have entire conversations without speaking, and the audience understands every word. That’s some serious chemistry, and it shows at the box office.

Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal

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Nobody quite knew what to expect when they saw that Billy Crystal was going to star in a movie next to Robert De Niro, but the match-up ended up working out perfectly for everyone involved. De Niro and Crystal not only worked, but made a perfect comedy team in 1999’s Analyze This and again in Analyze That just five years later. The two play their favorite roles, one the urbane New Yorker and the other a key figure in the New York Mafia, and neither took themselves too seriously. The light-heartedness of their jabs back and forth made the audience believe they could easily be the best of friends for their entire lives.

Mel Gibson and Danny Glover

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The quintessential cop-franchise, the Lethal Weapon series, brought Mel Gibson and Danny Glover together in what was nothing short of downright awkward at first. But, it didn’t take long for the two characters (and the actors behind them) to get close, and the movie left every guy feeling like he needs to call his best friend if he weren’t already watching it with him over some beers. In total the series went through four installments, each with a different part of life being shared by the two partners, and finally ends with an outright family of oddballs that couldn’t be more perfect. Maybe recent developments in personal lives don’t seem to lend to well to these two teaming up again, but it’d be pretty awesome if they did.

Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker

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Taking the cop-movie in a different direction, Chan and Tucker had people scratching their heads wondering just how the pair were going to pull off a buddy movie of all things. Anyone still wondering that by the time they saw the movie found themselves pleasantly surprised, to say the least, because 1998’s Rush Hour was not only hilarious and action-packed, but the audience could actually feel the two actors becoming close friends as the film progressed. They went on to expand that in two sequels, in 2001 and 2007, grossly nearly billion dollars for the franchise.

Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor

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It doesn’t get much more ridiculous than this. Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor: geniuses, madmen, offensive and obscene, the both of them, never failed to make an audience laugh. They were both brutally honest men, and both hysterical by themselves, but put together they made a team so unique that it can never be duplicated. They got together four times between 1976 and 1991, and even though both had completely separate careers to make them kings of comedy unto themselves, they are respected as one of the most important duos in the history of film.

John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson

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Once you’ve seen 1994’s Pulp Fiction, you are destined to have flashbacks at random moments of the conversations that take place between Travolta and Jackson as they play what may be their best roles ever: Vincent and Jules. They are simply amazing, and even though they’re technically henchmen in the story, you never notice it all that much. Your focus is always drawn to what they’re talking about, how they interact, the way they feel like brothers even though they couldn’t possibly look more different. These two epitomize good casting in ways that most film-makers can only dream about, and Pulp Fiction, though wildly popular for any number of reasons, wouldn’t be the same movie if it weren’t for these two hamming it up Tarantino-Noir style.