Freebie and the Bean Details

An early variation on the buddy cops routine that is dominated by a series of spectacular car crashes as San Francisco cops James Caan and Alan Arkin pursue mobster Jack Kruschen. Hugely tasteless (there are a flurry of racist jokes from Caan about Arkin's Mexican origins), this is a film where most of the characters are treated with contempt, but director Richard Rush puts so much energetic inventiveness into the turbulence you're almost convinced he doesn't mean it.

Violent comedy melodrama with a high mortality rate, amoral outlook, and the usual seventies reliance on incoherent plot, bumbled dialogue and excessive background noise. Occasionally funny all the same.