The Wild Pair

Any movie with Bubba Smith has to be, at the very least, entertaining. This movie is great if you are in a silly mood. Beau Bridges is a pretty awful actor, and Bubba Smith, fresh from his Police Academy days, is no Laurence Olivier. But, you dont rent this movie for that reason. It is a silly, 80's cop caper where there is a joke at least every ten minutes about Bubba Smith's height and strength (he either punches someone out or cannot fit into a care, etc). But, there is an interesting twist with a cat that has yet to be duplicated in any movie I have seen. In any event, you know what you are getting into when you are looking at Beau and Bubba movies and this one is no different. I say rent it, but make sure to rent another movie in the process.

"The Wild Pair" jumps wildly between comedy, action and drama. Smith and Bridges are mismatched as a pair of cops who stumble upon a hate group out to cause mayhem. The action is brutal, particularly a scene where Smith's girlfriend is butchered. This movie is somewhat of a Bridges family affair: a couple of Beau Bridges' sons are featured in small roles, and his dad Lloyd is good as the head of the hate group.

I watched this in the 80s on rented on VHS when I was about 8 years old. I then watched it again in my teens in the late 90s.

25 years later it showed up on Amazon Prime and all I could remember from it was Bubba Smith from nowhere coming at the villains with a tank at the end.

This is a very forgettable movie, Bubba Smith for some reason spends the entire movie running about in Spandex Yoga pants with socks that go up to his thighs. He is supposed to be a police detective working with the FBI and he is sitting there being chewed out by his captain sitting there in Yoga pants repeatedly and nothing is said to him.

What I didn't notice when I was 8 years old was the amount of innaporpriate sex references there were in this film.

The first brawl takes place in a stripclub with the strippers, naked, fighting people with full things jangling on them the entire time. Then they go to an adult movie theatre for no reason whatsoever with an adult movie playing in the background when there is a random shoot out inside of there.

Then they twice go to adult "toy shop" to meet with informants. And you see the motorised toys in full frontal view of the camera with the actors in the background to them.

It feels weird and inappropriate it all being there for what was a standard 80s 48hrs style clone buddy cop movie, it just feels like the makers were trying to ensure they received an R rating so shoehorned all this in at the last moment. As there are barely any action scenes in the movie and they are very tame by movies of the time.

Its worth a watch on Amazon prime, but nothing more than this.

Between the period when B movies were in theaters and the direct-to-video days of now, there were a number of movies like this made that should have gone direct to video. I can't imagine people enjoying this in theaters in 1987 - even if it had been released in 1977, audiences would have found it flat both in the action and humor departments. There's nothing here that you haven't seen before, so don't shed a tear if you go through life not watching it. The only thing of exception to write about is a mean-spirited tone that occasionally pops up, mostly in the scenes when Bubba's character kills defenseless villains.

Whoever thought this was a good idea needed to get their head examined. Bubba Smith was great in the Police Academy movies, but here he has to emote and be an action hero. You can tell his knees are shot because he has trouble moving around properly and he has a strange insistence on wearing his socks over his pants and pulled up to his knees. You're supposed to feel his pain at having his girlfriend and cat murdered, but he's not exactly Brando and you're left with a whole bunch of nothing. Then there's Lloyd Bridges, who's supposed to be an evil racist, but spends most of the movie playing toys with his grandson. Look, if you want him to come across as a villain, you maybe don't want to show him playing with a toddler and making the kid laugh? Maybe have him torture someone? Sure he orders things, but it's always a brief moment between playing with the kid. Beau Bridges is supposed to be the by the book FBI agent, but he spends the whole movie ditching Bubba and getting beat up. The only saving grace of this movie was the fact that they used a tank at the end. And also the visual of Bubba Smith on a teeny pizza delivery scooter.