It had great humour, great action, and a strong, believable relationship between the two main characters, claims director Jack Sholder of the script of this buddy-cop-chase movie. Sholders most distinguished earlier work, The Hidden, was a triumph not of subtle character interplay or perceptive social comment but of crashed cars, machine-gun shoot-outs, energetic running-around and trashed public property. Renegades, despite all that believable relationship jazz, is simply more of the same.
During one of the many chases, Knepper takes a detour through a museum of American History and steals a sacred spear that has been in the Lakota Sioux tribe forever and which Phillips, a passing Indian, swears to get back at all costs, up to and including the deaths of his entire family. Phillips gets his witch doctor father to nurse Sutherland back to health and soon theyre on the streets together looking for Knepper, crashing cars, leaping between trains, shooting it out in restaurants or beauty parlours, torturing people, insulting each other - basically, all the regulation action movie kind of things.*Cliches and plot contrivances are visible at some distance and all the frenetic running around does not disguise the fundamental stupidity of the heroes or the sheer silliness of the plot. Oh, and remember that strong, believable relationship between the two main characters? Well, towards the end of the film, Phillips gives Sutherland half a magic rock.