Hickey & Boggs is a lament for the very thing it destroys: the heroic myth of the Private Detective. Those hardboiled ideals come crashing down the moment we meet our protagonists, down-on-their-luck partners Hickey (Bill Cosby) and Boggs (Robert Culp, also the film’s director).

[...]

Hickey and Boggs are given $500 to track down a missing woman. They think their problems are solved, but they’re only beginning. When they visit their first lead, they find a corpse and several thousand dollars that are traced back to a $400,000 unsolved bank robbery, but not the woman they want. It doesn’t take long for bullets to start flying and corpses to start piling up, and with the gangsters as eager as the cops to get Hickey and Boggs off the case, its only a matter of time before the duo winds up in prison or in the morgue. Forever losers, Hickey and Boggs are destined to always be behind the eight ball.

1.85:1 Disc Size: 23,156,252,063 bytes

Feature Size: 22,802,810,880 bytes

ADDITION: Kino Lorber - Region 'A' - Blu-ray April 15': This a fairly obvious upgrade. The 1080P improves in most areas - tighter, brighter, more realistic skins tones, contrast layering, more information in the frame, and even some pleasing depth. Looks solid.

Audio is a DTS-HD Master 2.0 at 1681 kbps with aggressive effects like the gunshots sounding fairly deep. Ted Ashford composed an conducted for the score - his only notable feature. It does sound consistent with some richness and does support this moody film well.

***