Crime Busters (1977)

Crime Busters arrives from 1977, which is to say from a geological era before the current cultural weather system had fully formed. Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, the Italian cinema's most reliable export after espresso, play two unemployed Miami men who botch a supermarket robbery, wander into a police station by accident, and enlist as officers to avoid jail. What follows is a long sequence of punches, slaps, and property damage administered with the timing of a metronome. The film took a Golden Screen Award alongside The Exorcist and The Towering Inferno, a fact that tells us something about 1977 and almost nothing about the film itself.

On the matter of social consciousness, the record is sparse and we should say so plainly. The cast is a predominantly Italian and white European ensemble, with a Chinese immigrant family folded into the plot as a device to motivate the heroes. The film extends them no commentary, no arc, no interiority. There is no romantic agency worth measuring, no queer subtext, no environmental conscience, no class critique aimed at the dock dealers who serve as stock villains. Bud Spencer's bulk is a punchline, not a statement. The screenplay concerns itself entirely with the comedic physics of a man being struck by a chair, and it is content there.

This is not a criticism, or not exactly. It is a classification. The picture is a machine built for a single purpose and it achieves that purpose without ambition beyond it. Monthly Film Bulletin found it dull. AllMovie found it likeable. Both assessments stand. We file it under entertainment, unadorned, and return to our ledger.