Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Disturbing yet enthralling

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It would seem that this film would be banking on residual affection for the action spy series of the sixties, "I SPY", where Culp and Cosby played bright, funny pals that joked and wisecracked their way through the cloak-and-dagger adventures. But here, they make no attempt to revive that devil-may-care camaraderie, and apparently thinking they needed to be taken seriously as action stars, play nothing for laughs. They don't kid around at all, in fact they never even smile or get emotional one way or another. They're sullen and tired and cynical with none of the chemistry that worked so well before.It's not like they're hostile to each other, more like indifference, like somebody you work with, but never have any personal stake in. Maybe they thought these characters would be more realistic, but the fantastic situations are not. Several times big exploding catastrophes take place in what should be very public places, yet no one's around. The plot is convoluted and unexciting. Ifyou went in because you liked Cup and Cosby, you'll be disappointed in this downer.

I've been hearing about this movie for years. A couple days ago I spent the three dollars on Amazon and watched it. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.The first thing I noticed was that this was not a movie about pretty people living the glamorous life in Los Angeles. Our two protagonists do not live well. Hickey (Bill Cosby) evidently owns two suits. Boggs (Robert Culp) is only seen in the same blue suit. Their vehicles are wrecks - on their last legs. Both men are weary and just grimy. There is even one shot in which we can see the sweat stains on Bogg's shirt.It's apparent that if the movie came with smell Hickey and Boggs would need showers.One also gets the definite impression that the movie was filmed when it was hot in L.A. and there was no air conditioning available. Windows are open to catch what breeze there is and the air looks like you could cut it with a knife. There is absolutely no effort to make Southern California or our heroes look clean and neat. Wilted is the word that comes to mind.And they aren't they only ones .The police officers and much of the general public look the same way.Considering that in the early seventies Southern California was still considered to be the land of milk and honey to many Americans the decision to show the wormy underbelly of the state was daring.Our heroes are not slick, perfect men. Neither are in very good shape. At one point Boggs breaks into a run, but soon gives it up. They aren't very good shots with their revolvers (a refreshing change of pace actually) and they more or less stumble onto many of the leads in the course of their investigation.When the story ends they haven't accomplished anything except to kill the three mob soldiers who dog them throughout the movie. They save nobody, the mob remains untouched, and they might very well be looking at time in prison. At best they'll probably lose their private investigator licenses.It's been said before, but this movie would never get made today. At least not as a mainstream movie. There is no satisfying conclusion. The villains continue to prosper with only a few low level "torpedos" and a middle level manager dead. The female ,who at first one thinks might need to be helped by our intrepid P.I.'s, soon turns out to be as bad as everyone else.Jaded and cynical, but I liked this movie. It was smartly written and had a bite to it that one doesn't find anymore. In 2011 movie characters are perfect. Even the villains are perfect. In 1972 there was still room for the ordinary, sloppy, imperfect people.

In the grand scheme of movie things, there are probably a million movies that will be considered better than Hickey and Boggs, but this almost-missed 1972 crime drama that reunites Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, the two stars of the popular TV series, I Spy, has more than enough golden flecks to justify looking for it on Amazon.Al Hickey (Cosby) and Frank Boggs (Culp) are two down-on-their-luck private dicks who share the honors of being fired by the LAPD and having very little to fall back upon . Although the plot sounds hopelessly clichéd (the loot from a bloody armored car robbery resurfaces in LA, and a melting-pot of gangster/corporate suits, black revolutionaries, Mexican immigrants, murderous-but-not- brilliant hit-men, and hysterically angry detectives come after the all-but-divorced Hickey and the alcoholic, pole-dancer-addicted Boggs) screenwriter Walter Hill and director Culp make the viewer care about these two lost and lonely working stiffs who used to be proud, but who are now desperately threadbare.I Spy was light and fluffy. Hickey and Boggs bombed at the box office because viewers were expecting a more of the same, a dramedy, but there's damned little humor in this film. Yet, the performances of and the chemistry between Bill Cosby and Robert Culp are so very believable that the audience is left jittery from the suspense of where and how the "torpedoes" will strike again. On a personal level, Hickey's marriage to the beautiful Rosalind Cash is a shambles, and Boggs has all but given up fighting his addictions to booze, girls, and mid-sixties Ford Thunderbirds.It's so palpable, so frantic for these men as they try to make a buck, defend themselves from the baddies and the goodies, and get past the professional and personal chaos they have helped to create.There is an excruciating moment when Hickey's mother-in-law, the always watchable Isabel Sanford, stands on the porch of her daughter's house, the site of the latest "torpedo" attack, and verbally disembowels Cosby--while Cosby's daughter desperately tries to keep her sanity by mowing the lawn--and you can't quite hear Sanford's anguished, angry voice over the highway noise. The look of defeat on Cosby's face is his character writ small.Meanwhile, Culp sits in a strip club, destroying his liver, and is almost in tears as a dancer with dead eyes flirts with him. Like Cosby, he is alone and vanquished. Even the strippers don't care.Although the ending is stolidly predictable, the viewer is relieved to see that there is some hope for Al and Frank. There is a lot of shooting, with everyone from the Panther-types to a thoroughly vicious Michael Moriarty either eviscerated or burned to a crisp. They walk off down the beach, slogging through the sand, and, hopefully, they will find a way to repair their lives.Yeah, Hickey and Boggs is an artsy downer, but, as I said before, there are enough moments of style and substance in this underestimated film noir to make it both watchable and, to the patient viewer, emotionally accessible. There is a line in Hickey and Boggs, after a nasty firefight in the LA Coliseum, where Culp, instead of saying something pithy or sarcastic about the torpedoes, simply fumes, "I gotta get a bigger gun. I can't hit a damned thing."That's a little gold fleck right there.

Robert Culp is another example of a first-time director not letting traditional storytelling get in the way of his offbeat style (William Peter Blatty being another), and here he takes a cop thriller/mystery and turns it on its head.Although the editing is incoherent in parts, and the plot is often hard to follow, the characterization of the two leads is more important to the director, and he captures a full-fledged pair of down and out detectives truly memorable in their chemistry.Unlike the endless buddy cop films that have turned the genre into bacteria nowondays, here, every scene with Cosby and Culp is hyper-realistic and not without dry humor and dialogue. Additonally. the last 20 minutes of the film are exciting with a lot of solid action, spewing machine-gun bullets, and the final image that plays over the crawl is unforgettably beautiful. Great theme song.