Usually, I as left-wing, pacifist fan of very violent movies can find excuses or creative interpretations to defend those movies in front of myself. Even the notoriously proto-fascist Italian cop movie does not look all that fascist to me. Leave it to Umberto Lenzi to make a film in the genre I find morally repugnant.
Raving, violent psychopath Leonardo Tanzi (Maurizio Merli) is a lucky guy. His police badge is a fine thing to hide behind when he's smashing bones and torturing people. It even affords him a beautiful moral high horse: The evil gangsters you see, are protected by the way too lenient law (you know, the lenience that affords himself to torture and kill people without getting more than a demotion).
He reserves special hatred for the gang of a certain Savelli (Biagio Pelligra), that seems to be lead by the hunchbacked Moretto (Tomas Milian). But Tanzi can't proof anything and the evil, unfair law doesn't allow him to just grab people off the street and incarcerate them forever. What a letdown! Of course his inability to get the gang has nothing to do with the fact we never see Tanzi do any legal and actual police work.
And, you know what? I am much too irritated by the tone of the movie to get deeper into the quagmire it calls its plot. You know how films like this always go, anyway. Just picture the usual with added right-wing ranting and more gangsters who are let on the streets again to do the vilest crimes imaginable.
What gets to me most here is the terrible self-righteousness the film exudes. Unlike in other films of this genre, there is not single thing the hero does the movie itself doesn't seem to applaud; I never had the feeling anyone involved in the production even had the slightest thought about the similarity between our so-called hero and the people he is trying to capture.
There's also the problem of Tanzi's character. Most "cops on the edge" get a final and very personal nudge to finally snap. Tanzi is a brutal thug right from the start. The film even includes an attack on his girlfriend that would be quite a nice motive for an escalation in his violent tendencies, unfortunately subtleties of this kind are beyond Lenzi and writer Dardano Sacchetti in this film. Actually, every element to make Tanzi (and the film's morals) more complex is there, Lenzi just seems to have more fun showing us the next atrocity one of those e-vol gangsters commit.
Which leads me to a more technical problem: The plotting is extremely weak, even if you, like me, don't expect all that much coherence from an Italian movie. There's just no dramatic arc to speak of, it's just one damn thing after another with not much more than Tanzi connecting them.
The action is quite great and Merli and Milian are imbuing the little they have to do with a lot of intensity, but really, what's the use?
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2 comments:
It's funny how you can watch some of the weirdest, most violent stuff around and then my offended by something like this, but I know what you mean. I tend to dislike torture-happy thugs who get all self-righteous about it. The TV show 24 turned me off for the same kind of reasons.
Yeah, you're right. I lost my patience with 24 relatively early on because of this, too.
The film just really got to me in all the wrong ways.
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