Hickey & Boggs (1972)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The plot jumps all over the place and makes it a confusing watch, trying to figure out how, what, who and why this scene is happening is a struggle. Shame as the cast, photography and score are all first class. Walter Hill's script (8/10) deserved a more experienced director who is great with the cast but cannot make a coherent story. The direction and editing are a master class in how not to make a film. If your a fan of seventies film noir then there is much to still enjoy, i liked Robert Culp's scene in the strip joint where is hangdog face works a treat. And it's always fun watching actors when they are pretty young - James Woods and Michael Moriarty look younger than the socks i'm wearing.

There are several things which are attractive from this film.The pairing of Robert Culp (also directing) with Bill Cosby again. They were very good on televisions I Spy and are just as good here.The nostalgic look at the LA Colesium with footage of a 1972 Rams-Falcons game including Rams Punter Pat Studstill and some vintage Dodger Footage, Culp sneaking in a line from one of the female co-stars telling Cosby he has a bad sense of humor.The action is pretty good and the photography are strong. The plot while predictable is OK. There is a lot of gunfire but not as much blood as the Clint Eastwood films of the same period.Film noir from the 1970's.

The guys from I, Spy are back and "it" hits the fan. Hickey and Boggs are two long in the tooth private investigators on their last legs, physically and financially. They get a case that seems like a good deal to make a few bucks. Then they uncover some things that the really, really bad guys do not want uncovered. The more the bad guys try to get them off the case the harder they press. Then one of their families is murdered as a warning and they go methodically ballistic. Now they are looking not for information but for some people to kill. Also featured is Bill Hickman, one of Hollywood's most sought after stunt drivers and the driver of the black Charger in "Bullitt." You never saw Bill Cosby portray a quiet family man turned into a methodical, cold blooded killer. Don't miss a chance to see it.

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.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.