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Nice effects though.

Good concept, poorly executed.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

First time producer Fouad Said, a former cameraman who worked on a number of episodes of the "I Spy" TV series (1965-68), joined forces with erstwhile associates Bill Cosby and Robert Culp to make 'Hickey & Boggs', a crime thriller written by neophyte screenwriter (later director-producer) Walter Hill ('48 Hours'). Viewers expecting a feature-length episode of "I Spy" were in for a surprise. The TV series was cool and jaunty: "Man from U.N.C.L.E." for hipsters. 'Hickey & Boggs' is grim, gritty, and downbeat with Cosby and Culp deliberately working against their glamorous TV star personae by playing Al Hickey and Frank Boggs as two world-weary, down-at-the-heels private investigators facing the moral wasteland of contemporary Los Angeles with a growing sense of powerlessness and despair. In its heyday (c.1940–1957), film noir typically espoused a bleak view of human nature and modern society but sometimes held out the possibility of the hero's redemption through honor and heroism. By the early Seventies such romantic notions of individual agency seemed quaint if not deluded. Accordingly, the movie's complicated plot, involving stolen money from a bank heist, vengeful mobsters, no-nonsense cops, and volatile revolutionaries, soon expands beyond the ability of the protagonists to control it, or even affect the situation to any discernible degree. After surviving an apocalyptic showdown, Hickey complains to Boggs: "Nobody came, nobody cares. It's still not about anything." Enfeebled by a world of intrigue that renders them mere adjuncts to the action, Hickey and Boggs are further emasculated in the war of the sexes. Neither is able to sustain a marriage, or even a healthy relationship. Hickey is to blame when his estranged wife, Nyona (Rosalind Cash) is murdered by the mob. Boggs, an alcoholic, frequents a bar where his ex- wife, Edith (Sheila Sullivan; Culp's actual wife at the time), works as a stripper and taunts him from the stage while revealing her assets. Cynical and nihilistic in the extreme, 'Hickey & Boggs' did poor box office; even by the pessimistic standards of its time, it was a bummer. Also featured is James Woods in an early film role. VHS (2003) and DVD (2004).

The early '70s was a goldmine for Los Angeles noir, as the city matured and the independent film came along for the ride. On the surface, this film is a great example: a complex, almost viscerally intuitive plot, excellent cinematography, decent and often interesting direction and editing, and like so many films shot during this period in Los Angeles, a kind of pre-nostalgia for the often-dark place that was disappearing, and turning into something even worse, a place of mindless, impersonal violence, with the bland corporate character of the late 20th century.That said, the film suffers from perhaps being too understated, and certainly too nihilistic. Fans of Walter Hill might take issue, but this is a problem I have with most of his films; while they might be visually interesting and often brilliant, they are so hopeless as to make one wonder, as the characters in this film do aloud, what the point is. In this film there are two survivors, the title characters; nearly every other character is killed or so one-dimensionally hateful that it renders the conclusion quite unsatisfying. I especially felt the lack of character permitted to Cosby and Culp; while they were certainly playing against their debonair banter in "I Spy" on purpose, Hill's screenplay renders them so oppressed and silent that they are almost outside the story, like some existential Pinter characters dropped in to intentionally find the rock-bottom. It was a valiant effort, but after the final carnage, I found it so pointless and yet a clear sign where Hill was going, into a glamorous, beautiful world of violence for its own sake.

Bill Cosby is Hickey and Robert Culp is Boggs, two partners in a run-down Los Angeles private detective agency. They're swept up in a battle between two gangs over a stash of half a million dollars. The police hate the two private eyes because, as they investigate the case, dead bodies start turning up. A climactic shoot out on the beach involves two airplanes. The protagonists are the only survivors.It's a confusing and twisted story, hard to follow, but the frustration is relieved by occasional minor that have some originality. Director Culp doesn't always give us a head-on shot of what's happening, but shows us the reaction of others so that we know anyway. And there is some humor, understated like the rest of the story.Example of comic incident. Culp has been torturing himself by visiting the club where his divorced wife is a go-go dancer. He still loves her, while she enjoys seeing him in pain. "Eat your heart out," she sneers while uncoiling her hips towards him. Cosby drags him out, drunk, and takes him to a used car dealer to buy a car. The barely sober Culp reels to the nearest dented auto, clicks some switches on and off, and asked the smiling salesman, "How's it run?" Salesman: "Terrific." The salesman has his cigar almost back in his mouth but Culp instantly replies, "I'll take it," and the cigar is halted in mid-lift while the salesman gapes.The two men pack .44 magnums in the last half of the movie, but, alas, they don't have the panache of Dirty Harry's Big Gun, which appeared a year earlier, nor do they make thunderous sounds or give any evidence of recoil when fired. They look like pea-shooters with extra-long barrels.The fact that the story is almost too complicated to follow needn't be the kiss of death. Raymond Chandler was notorious and yet some of his work has been turned into winners. The thing is that Chandler usually had a narrator, Philip Marlowe, given to crude literary tropes: "Her hair was the color of gold in old paintings." Or, "My bank account could have crawled under a duck's belly." "Hickey and Boggs" has no narrator and, lacking a compelling plot, must be carried along by its performances and its atmosphere, a little like "Chinatown," but it doesn't pull it off. Both Hickey and Boggs seem exhausted and sweaty. Cosby and Culp work well together but their dialog lacks drama. They'd worked together for years on a TV series, "I Spy." There's nothing notable about the milieu either. The set dressings are no more than functional. The exteriors have only occasional scenes that hint at the summer heat and noise of Los Angeles -- the cars whizzing by on the freeways, the houses perched on cliffs, the ubiquitous Cal Worthington commercials on television.In the end, after a nihilistic pronouncement, the two men walk away from the carnage with shoulders slumped. The viewer knows how they feel.

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.