bmacv wrote on IMDB:
Action and suspense films from the early 1970s have a distinctive
period flavor to them. The surprisingly effective Hickey and Boggs
co-star Robert Culp's sole directorial effort embodies that
disillusioned and dissolute era of movie making. The rough and choppy
editing, the oddly cropped shots keep the viewer on edge; so do the
less than pristine cinematography and the cacophonous sound track, with
dialogue overlaid on a constant, dull background roar of ambient noise.
Often this proved to be a recipe for pretentious but empty disasters
and cynical exploitation films; here, it all works to keep the level of
unease of menace uncomfortably high.
Bill Cosby and Robert Culp play the title characters, a couple of
down-on-their-luck Los Angeles private investigators. (Many moviegoers
of the era apparently expected a big-screen reprise of their successful
pairing in the television spoof of the 1960s, I Spy; how wrong they
were.) They are engaged to find a missing woman by one of those
creepily effete characters who, since Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo in The
Maltese Falcon, exist only to set up private eyes in the movies. And as
they go about their sleuthing, they uncover a trail of brutally
murdered corpses, a situation which does not endear them to the police.
They come to learn that the woman they're tracking holds the take from
a robbery of the Federal Reserve Bank in Pittsburgh some years before;
they've been hired as finger men by one of a number of murky but
vicious groups seeking to retrieve the cash. [ show more ]
The movie forgoes crisp, clockwork plotting for a generalized miasma of
corruption, duplicity and malaise. There are allusions to the turbulent
politics of the times in the involvement of black militants and Chicano
radicals; there are whiffs, too, of the specter of newly hatched
sexualities that threaten the status quo. At the scene of one murder,
they find crushed amyl nitrite poppers and gay porn, while the jaded
oldster who engages them suns himself on a towel sited suspiciously
close to a set of swings where young children are cavorting; for that
matter Culp, in his cups and a masochistic, self-pitying mood, watches
his ex-wife flaunt herself in a strip club to be ogled by drunken
strangers.
The malaise, of course, becomes murderous in Walter Hill's very violent
screenplay, touching Cosby's character (his estranged wife ends up
tortured to death). Still, the two dead-end dicks soldier on, more
though one another's goading than from any code or commitment they're
both on the verge of giving up and sliding down into the vortex of
lust, avarice and revenge that has become their world (and by
extension, THE world). Describing Hickey and Boggs makes it sound like
the ultimate downer; it is, but it's an uncommonly compelling piece of
film making, and one that has pretty much fallen through the cracks of
movie history. [ show less ]
Written on IMDB a long time ago.
