In short: Sweeney 2 (1978)

Flying Squad coppers Regan (John Thaw) and Carter (Dennis Waterman) have to cope with a number of cases that are as brutal as they are peculiar. A series of particularly murderous bank robberies committed by well-armed men rocks London. There’s something more peculiar to the deeds than just their often needless brutality: for some reason, the gangsters like to leave their getaway drivers – and only them - for dead, and only ever take sums of about sixty thousand pounds with them, even when there’s more money to grab.

Eventually, clues will lead our policemen out of their natural habitat to the continent. But don’t worry, this is not a movie about evil criminal foreigners.

For my tastes, Sweeney 2, the second and final movie spin-off of the the popular and somewhat important ITV police show, this time directed by Tom Clegg, is a marked improvement over the already highly entertaining first one. The film keeps to the grubby and grainy 70s aesthetics of the first one, but has a rather more engaging plot, as well as rather more interesting side characters. Regan and Carter encounter all kinds of peculiar customers during their investigation, like a semi-nude model with a Nazi fetish – or a fetish for Nazis? – and other semi-probable weirdoes, and have rather more interesting times with them than in the first movie as well.

While the violence stays as pleasantly brutal and effective as in the first one, this sequel seems rather more interested in the effects this violence has on its protagonists, so there are scenes of hardened coppers Regan and Carter spattered with blood, going into shock. Which not only makes enjoying the violence on display rather more precarious for a viewer, but also makes the macho types we are supposed to root for more human and sympathetic.

Also rather interesting is how much the film portrays dramatic versions of working class cultures: the cops and the robbers are both very visibly from the same kinds of social stratum with comparable social mores and energies – at least up to a point, for these policeman certainly wouldn’t go around complaining about England having run its course (which is code for exactly what you think it is code for), emigrate, and then only ever return home for a bit of murder and mayhem, for there’s being working class and then there’s being a murderous shit, a fine point this film understands in all of its subtlety.