It’s the 80s, so you will be not terribly surprised to hear that this one’s about an odd couple of terrible cops much better at killing than at investigating anything, as they are stomping down on civil and human rights and are shouted at by their bosses. Wait, actually, this is more realistic than I wanted to give it credit for.
But seriously, the mandatory crazy slob of a cop here is a guy called Barzack (Robert Carradine). When he’s not obsessing about a drug boss he just can’t seem to kill, ahem, put behind bars, he’s wallowing in self pity, eating unhealthily, sabotaging his partner’s sex life, avoiding his mother, torturing junkies and stalking his ex-wife (Valerie Bertinelli), who, because this is a movie, still holds a bit of a torch for him too, for inexplicable reasons. His more together buddy and partner is the suave hobby jazz trumpeter and full-time ladies’ man Hazeltine (Billy Dee Williams). Obviously, the film spends more time with Barzack, because the audience might enjoy themselves otherwise.
I won’t really talk about the plot in any more depth, because we all know more or less what happens in this sort of thing.
Most 80s buddy cop movies play pretty badly to most modern audiences; police brutality, it appears, has stopped to be funny and entertaining for many people. While I’d be perfectly willing to defend more than a few of the genre brethren of Jack Smight’s Number One with a Bullet (not because but despite of their failings), the film at hand really isn’t worth it, for there’s nothing here that makes up for any of its politics. To wit: the action – apart from a short sequence concerning people attempting to flatten Williams – is perfunctory and really not up to the standards of craziness you’d hope for in a Cannon production like this. Barzack is completely insufferable, though the film seems to believe its audience will react with something more akin to “oh, look at that poor broken man”. Instead he’s making this viewer wish for the bad guys to win this time so Barzack will at least stop whining and leave his ex-wife in peace. Williams is wasted on being Carradine’s foil getting very little of interest to do for himself. Let’s not even talk about the plotting that leans on complete nonsense like the protagonists leaving a guy hanging from a building after they have tortured him, so that he can then be conveniently killed by a bad guy, leading to their well-deserved suspension we apparently are supposed to feel to be scandalous.
And then there’s what goes as “humour” for this one, clearly written without the secret knowledge that jokes are supposed to be funny.
It’s rather a disappointing movie coming from an experienced hired hand director like Smight.
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