D'Antoni took his sole directing credit on this film. He was earlier responsible for producing the gritty cop thriller Bullitt, followed by The French Connection, which won him the 1971 Academy Award for Best Picture. All three feature a memorable car chase sequence.
Several other people who worked on The French Connection were also involved in this film, such as Scheider, screenwriter and police technical advisor Sonny Grosso, composer Don Ellis, and stunt coordinator Bill Hickman. 20th Century Fox was again the distributor.
Buddy Manucci, played by Scheider, is a loose remake of the character of Buddy "Cloudy" Russo he played in The French Connection, a character who also used dirty tactics to capture his enemies, and who was also based on Sonny Grosso.
NYPD Detective Buddy Manucci has been getting flak from the higher-ups in the New York City police force he works for because his team of renegade policemen, known as The Seven-Ups (the name comes from the fact that most convictions done by the team heralds jail sentences to criminals from Seven years and Up) has been using unorthodox methods to capture criminals; this is illustrated as the team ransacks an antiques store that is a front for the running of counterfeit money.
Also lately, there has been a rash of kidnappings; the twist is that it seems that only upper echelon criminals (Mafioso and white-collar types) are the ones being kidnapped, illustrated when Max Kalish is kidnapped and a ransom is paid at a car wash. This leads to many plot twists in which Manucci tries to figure out the puzzle, with help supplied to him by an informant (Tony Lo Bianco), who turns out to be untrustworthy, leading to the death of one of the Seven-Up officers.
Manucci figures out the puzzle, but not before The Seven-Ups splinter from the fallout, and Manucci's life is placed in jeopardy.
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