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.

Three Films Make A Post: Don't meddle with the devil.

Saturday Morning Mystery aka Saturday Morning Massacre (2012): This low budget horror comedy by Spencer Parsons posits an edgy version of the Scooby Doo cast with filed-off numbers visiting a supposedly haunted house that does end in a bit of a massacre for them.

This isn’t really my kind of humour: “just imagine the gang having sex while on LSD”, “let’s kill the dog!” just doesn’t do much for me as jokes go, particularly since the movie doesn’t do terribly much with the set-up. To be fair, the gory bits are nicely realized and staged.

Moonfall (2022): This Amazonbuster mixes Roland Emmerich’s main interests as a director: big dumb fun science fiction, big dumb unfun disaster movies, and not giving talented actors much to do. Well, I’m unfair about the third point, for the lead is played by Patrick Wilson, who is just his usual voidal self and is probably not playing below his possibilities there.

Whenever the film stays in the big dumb SF area – with a bit of idiot conspiracy theories and a cameo by Donald Sutherland – and makes a drinking game out of the word “megastructure”, it is actually a lot of brainless fun. Alas, whenever the disaster movie parts turn up, particularly in the otherwise wonderfully bonkers second half of the film, it’s the usual drag of Emmerich disaster types going through the Emmerich disaster movie motions. Though the film gets bonus points for squeezing a completely out of leftfield Fast and Furious CG car chase in.

Sweeney! (1977): Sweeney was a very popular ITV series that turned up the amount of sex and the violence allowed for a British TV show of the time. It was popular enough for two movie spin-offs which dial up the sex a bit and the violence even a lot more when compared with what the producers could just get away with on the TV. This first one, directed by David Wickes, does a version of the Profumo affair – a bit of an evergreen in the UK – but with rather a lot more murders to hush the affair up, and even more loathing for the political class than you’d expect going in.

Everybody is ugly, brutish and not terribly clever, London looks ugly, grimy and unpleasant, and our hero (John Thaw) eventually wins the day with an act of astonishing amorality. So, even if you’re like me and have seen not a single episode of the series, this is probably going to be a whole lot of fun as a nasty little bit of 70s crime/conspiracy cinema.