Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

mgtbltp Al Hickey (Cosby) and Frank Boggs (Culp) are two ex LAPD cops scrapping the bottom of the barrel trying to make ends meet as PI's in the brown haze of the smoggy gas guzzler dominated LA of the seventies. Their office is a back room accessed from a parking lot through a dilapidated peeling panel door, they can't pay their phone bill and the answering service so they opt for the service which they can check from phone booths. They chow on chillidogs from a street vendor and strategize the case at their local bar. Hickey drives a '62 Chevy Nova and is estranged from his wife & daughter, Boggs is a boozer, has a dented '61 T-bird, watches his ex-wife Elaine dance at a Live Nude Girl joint enduring her "eat your heart out" verbal jabs, and pays prostitutes at 20 bucks a pop. The film nicely transitions through Tinseltown's classic Film Noir icons of the past, the classic streamlined silver Super Chief "F" units, Union Station, and the Los Angeles City Hall to the smog shrouded broken dream downtown of 1970s.The tale starts when a creepy pedophile-ish lawyer named Rice hires the team to just find his "wife" Mary Jane (Carmencristina Moreno). Rice works for Leroy the head of a black power organization. Mary Jane is really the wife of Quemando (Louis Moreno) who held up a federal reserve bank in Pittsburgh for $400,000. She just hit town on the Super Chief and is trying to unload the hot money to various factions around SOCAL by mailing $1000 dollar samples to them, one of which is syndicate mobster Brill (Robert Mandan) who bankrolled the original heist. Given a list of leads, Hickey & Boggs begin a strange journey through the miasma of decadence and decay of The City Of Angels that one usually never saw, LA's chamber of commerce should have had a coronary. The film is filled with the ambient sounds of roaring freeway traffic, passing disembodied conversations and pounding surf. The various leads our boys encounter make a nice cross section weird characters, nobody seems normal except for the Mexican American family and they are the bank robbers.Hickey in the course of the tale discovers a dead lead and then Boggs uncovers a hidden envelope containing the sample $1000 bills in his house. After reporting the murder to the police and the discovery of the bills the authorities match the serial numbers to the Pittsburgh heist Hickey & Boggs are informed of a $25,000 reward. Now the boys have a motivated goal.The detectives Hickey & Boggs are similar to their earlier counterparts in spirit but here in this film they have almost lost the power to change their situations. In part I think this is more the fault of the screenplay. Whether the original Walter Hill screenplay or Bill Culp's changes or studio suits are to blame is worth investigating. In classic hard boiled stories the confrontations were small scale, the stories convoluted but still simple. Here, our two dicks are out gunned in three confrontations even battling helicopter mounted machine guns at the final denouement. This may be an effect of the increasing popularity of the Action Genre in the 70's and trying to modernize a traditional noir story into an action film rather than any statement of the ineffectuality of a private dick in the modern world. But Hicey & Boggs do win in the end but at a big cost.A film not without faults 8/10.

Spikeopath Hickey & Boggs is directed by Robert Culp and written by Walter Hill. It stars Culp, Bill Cosby, James Woods, Ta-Ronce, Carmencristina Moreno, Rosalind Cash, Lou Frizzel, Isabel Sanford and Sheila Sullivan. Music is by Ted Ashford and cinematography by Bill Butler. Al Hickey (Cosby) & Frank Boggs (Culp) are two jaded private investigators who get hired to find a missing woman and quickly find themselves submerged in a world of murder and untruths. I don't think the title does it any favours, because in no way does it imply what a bleak and potent neo-noir this is. In many ways Hickey & Boggs is the anti private investigator film, it portrays two men failing in life who are just about clinging to the last vestiges of their work, that of the private dick. Robert Culp and Walter Hill strip everything back to unglamourous terms, there is nothing remotely sexy or invigorating about this detective agency, Al and Frank do it because it's all they have, all they know in fact. The film makers push the two men through a grimy and fetid Los Angeles, pitching them in amongst an array of weirdos, killers, revolutionaries, sexual deviants and angry officials. There's actually a lot of bold colours on show, the two PI's themselves wearing bright lurid blue and green suits, but all the colour coding on show in the film is a front, a misdirection tactic, this Los Angeles is on the surface colourful and sunny into the bargain, but Hickey & Boggs firmly operates on a seedy and downbeat level, the urban milieu as far removed from a holiday brochure as you can get. Al and Frank, bless their shabby souls, are damaged goods, incapable of the kind of human interaction that most take for granted. Even between themselves they have lost the will to interact outside of work orientated chatter. In fact chatter is a key issue in the film, or lack of as it turns out. There's some beautifully zippy dialogue throughout, real spiky barbs straight out of noirville, but the pic is at its best, away from the action scenes, in how periods of silence involving Al & Frank say so much. One will either rant or repeatedly ask a question, while the other stares off into space or nurse yet another alcoholic beverage to forget his pain. As a character study, this wades through the sludge and blood to show a clinically cynical hand. Then there is the action scenes, excellently constructed by Culp. Two shoot-outs especially are high grade in quality, and extended they are as well. Aurally they are like a Panzer Division unloading its armoury, visually it's intentionally comic book as per bullets used, but excitement is guaranteed, while the finale, is played out on a beach that gives great carnage and then cuts like a knife to close the pic down in the most suitable of fashions. The screenplay is at times a little too aware of trying to be a convoluted nudge nudge wink wink to the halcyon days of film noir, with Walter Hill on his first writing assignment proving to be wet behind the ears, though the eagerness and respect of the style of film making is genuine in the extreme. Three absolutes come out of viewing Hickey & Boggs nowadays. One, is that Culp the director, some minor pacing issues aside, really shouldn't have let the film's poor box office prevent him from directing further assignments. Two, is that Cosby shows here he was capable of great character based drama, his performance is simply terrific. Three? Hickey & Boggs is under seen, under valued and should be a requisite viewing for anyone interested in neo-noir. 9/10

grubstaker58 Still another lost gem from the "Golden 1970's".It ranks right along side "The Long Goodbye" and Night Moves" as a super slice of "Modern Film Noir"-- 70's Los Angeles style.It truly is character driven (Boggs ,looking for clues under a murder victim's kitchen sink, see's a mouse-trap and then a mouse...he unloads the trap.)Yet there are very impressive , deftly staged ,action sequences...-a mid-day shoot-out in an eerily empty L.A. Coliseum and a night-time bullet exchange in a crowded Dodger Stadium parking lot.The Mob, the Cops , Black Militants, Latino Militants, marital problems...These guys(HIckey&Boggs) are in way over their heads and carry their just dusted off guns- in towels, for crying out loud. But they have each other's back and they're gonna "finsh the job". A Classic.

robb_772 A complex and intricate crime thriller, the grim violence and downbeat tone of this film will come as a major surprise to fans of the popular tongue-in-television series "I Spy," which also starred Bill Cosby and Robert Culp. Culp actually positioned himself in the director's chair for this outing (it remains his sole feature as a director), and the usually light-hearted actor proves himself to be surprisingly apt at crafting such moody and atmospheric entertainment. Culp also manages to effectively direct himself in one of his least mannered performances, and (best of all) elicits a terrific performance from Cosby. For those of you who are only familiar with the man from years of playing Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable and appearing in those heinous Jell-o pudding commercials, the cynicism and weariness of Cosby's performance will be a revelation – and, yes, he is completely believable as a tough guy.The screenplay by Walter Hill (who also penned scripts for 48 HOURS and ALIENS) is marvelously complex, and never insults the intelligence of viewers. There are a massive amount of characters that come in and out of the film (this is one of the only films I've ever seen where the end credits read like an organizational flow chart), and much of the film's plot doesn't finally fall into place until the second and third acts. Thankfully, both Hill and Culp are not afraid to ward off impatient viewers, and take plenty of time in establishing their intriguing set-up. The emerging film is intense and mature, and falls just behind IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT and TAXI DRIVER as the apex of modern film noir.Even though I truly believe this is a great and underrated film, I will fully admit that it may not be possible for me to be truly unbiased towards it. Matt Bennett, who memorably plays Fatboy, was my Great-Uncle. The intensity and menace that Matt brought to the role has always impressed me, and he was so convincing in the role that it basically type-cast him as insane villains for the rest of his career. I would probably love the film for his performance alone, but I did try to be as objective as possible.