BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Robert J. Maxwell By the late 1960s urban crime was rampant. In 1969, in Harlem, I had a pistol shoved in my face by two twelve-year-old kids who demanded my money, as if I had any. Nobody in Hollywood knew exactly how to deal with it. "Dirty Harry" in 1971 finally broke the ice, if only by addressing the problem in a paradisiacal setting and by turning the perp into a whining serial killer. "Serpico" was dirtier than Harry and dealt with corruption in the police hierarchy. That was 1972. This is 1974 and Ron Liebman and David Selby are two cops who are impatient with the bureaucratic rules, just as Dirty Harry was, and who face racial problems, which neither Harry nor Serpico did.In its essence, it's a more textured film. It's one thing to fight a serial killer or against determined police corruption. The good guy is good and the bad guys are bad. It's another to fight bureaucratic inertia. The enemy is established but nebulous. How do you begin? Liebman and Selby are cocky young rebels even when they are rookies in the NYPD and on probation. They bust drug dealers when they're off duty, and although the number of their collars grows, so does the paperwork, both for them and for the others in their precinct. Nobody likes a rate buster. They make everyone else look slow and lazy.The mad sociologist Max Weber described the transfer of labor from small businesses like farming and shoe making to large bureaucratic organizations like Standard Oil at the turn of the century. Bureaucracies worked very well because it was, ideally, a meritocracy and the lines of authority were strictly drawn. But forty years later, another sociologist, Robert K. Merton, observed that there was a major flaw in bureaucracies. If you stick your neck out by taking risks, you get your head chopped off.If you want promotions, smooth sailing, and a comfortable retirement, you keep your head down and do no more than what the formal rules require. You lose sight of the bureaucracy's goals and concentrate instead on doing what everyone else does -- avoiding responsibility in case something goes wrong. There is a character in "The Good Soldier Schweik" who follows army rules to the letter and by doing so almost brings the war to a complete halt. Merton called it bureaucratic ritualism but we can call it covering your arse or CYA.No ritualist becomes a rate buster. It's bad news for the bureaucracy and what's bad news for the institution soon becomes bad news for the rate buster. The senior cops assign Liebman and Selby to menial tasks like directing traffic and typing office memos.However, they prevail in the face of precinct conspiracies to degrade them and in the end they get a promotion with an ironic footnote attached.I don't mean to ramble on about bureaucracies but although they sound dull -- pathological even -- they're a fascinating subject because all of us have to deal with them in one way or another. Liebman and Selby don't break any of the rules but they demonstrate how informal customs come to be more important than the rules themselves. They may be super cops but others in their department report them to internal affairs for wearing sneakers instead of regulation shoes while chasing crooks.As for the movie itself, Serpico's story had obviously been shaped to add commercial appeal, but this one appears mostly made up. I believe the two super cops ran into problems with their colleagues. I don't believe they hid themselves in an empty cardboard box, began singing a Pepsi-Cola commercial, and then leaped out, guns drawn, and cornered a gang of drug dealers.This is a precursor to the kinds of action movies we commonly see today, in which, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger breaks somebody's neck while making a wisecrack. Of course, it has its serious moments and some scenes are packed with dramatic tension. But the overall emotional tonus is light-hearted.Liebman is great. He's always great, and always Jewish in the most appealing way. It's his movie. Selby is more of a sidekick than a partner. He has an odd face too, something like an owl's, with large eyes, an oversized beak, and a tiny mouth beneath.I enjoyed it, wisecracks and all, and I salute it for addressing a problem that is so shadowy that many of us can't even define it.

Trent Reid Director Gordon Parks' excellent buddy-cop corruption comedy, with a cast of great genre and character actors - this seems most often compared to Serpico, Dirty Harry and The French Connection from what little I could find on it. But really, it bears more resemblance to The New Centurions and earlier blaxploitation classics in terms of comic tone, racial politics and groovy yet tough protagonists. Curiously, there is a brief but enjoyable gunfight and chase through a building under demolition, making me involuntarily compare scenes and buddy mechanics with Starrett's The Gravy Train of the same year.Funny that it concerns a couple of unconventional cops nicknamed Batman and Robin, given that the screenwriter worked on the '60s series. Also, the presence of bulldog-eyed genre fave Pat Hingle, who would go on to repeatedly play Commissioner Gordon.Frazier has great inter-racial sexual tension with the also funny Leibman, and her scream session suggests that she could have had a terrific career in horror. Maybe now that this is getting screened at the New Bev in L.A. by Edgar Wright, one hopes that we could eventually see it surface from MGM for an HD broadcast.

udar55 This is based on the true story of two rookie NYC cops whose exploits earned them the nicknames "Batman" and "Robin" in the 70s. Ron Leibman stars as David Greenberg (Batman) and David Selby stars as Robert Hantz (Robin). These two rock the boat right away by making drug arrests on their days off. Naturally, this doesn't sit well with the other crooked cops who don't like to be made to look bad. The duo find themselves in all sorts of scenarios from stopping hit men out to kill them (true story) to beating up a purse snatcher who turns out to be a high ranking cop (not so true story). Directed by Gordon Parks and written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., THE SUPER COPS never really finds the right footing. With hard hitting cop dramas like DIRTY HARRY, THE FRENCH CONNECTION and SERPICO coming out in the previous years, it is kinda hard to imagine how audiences reacted to this. The cops are played as goofballs with Ron Liebman, a dead ringer for John Astin, being truly annoying. At the same time, there is some hard hitting stuff about corrupt police and the system. Interestingly, the film opens with footage of the two real cops receiving commendations from a character portray as crooked (by Pat Hingle) in the film. Even more interesting, the two cops apparently both fell on the wrong side of the law several years after this film was made.

Tiny-13 This film has slipped through the cracks of film history. It is by far much better than some other New York films of the same era such as: "The French Connection" or "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3". There is a gritty reality to this film which also manages to effectively use humor to further the plot line. It's engaging from start to finish and hasn't tarnished with age as is the case with the above two examples.Ron Liebman turns in a bravura performance as "Batman" and it's a shame his career didn't take off as a result of this project.Gordon Parks directs and, coming as it does after "Shaft", it at first appears to be a strange choice. Yet it is the flip side of that earlier effort and approached with just as much in your face machismo.Unfortunately this film has not been made available on either DVD or VHS in the United States. United Artists really has a gem on their hands and it's a shame they're not doing anything with it.