The Violent Professionals

Typical Italian police movie of the Seventies. The baddies (and sometimes the goodies) meet a violent death. Bandits, hostages, police shooting at anything and anybody, hand grenades fly through the air.... Entertaining car chases in the Milan of the period, particularly if you like spotting old cars! Sound-track unmistakably Seventies!

The hunky Luc Merenda stars here as Giorgio Caneparo, one of your standard "Dirty Harry"-type police detectives who has his own way of doing things. Motivated to righteous fury by the brazen murder of his loyal boss DelBuono (Chris Avram), he infiltrates the Milan underworld to seek answers.

Giorgio is nicely set up right at the beginning when he decides to put down some child-murdering scum who escaped authorities. It's a hoot to watch this character as he goes about his business: robbing a hooker at gunpoint, beating the stuffing out of her pimp, torturing an informant, etc. Yet, Merenda has plenty of charisma to spare in portraying this offbeat hero.

The script by the prolific Ernesto Gastaldi can get incoherent at times, but making up for that is the filmmaking savvy of Sergio Martino, who brings life to this cool example of Eurocrime cinema. There is gunfire, and sleaze, and a few chase scenes that are extremely well done. The chase scenes are the best part of the film.

The performances are right on the money, with Richard Conte co-starring as a mafioso who recruits Giorgio as a getaway driver, ignorant of his true identity. The very sexy Martine Brochard has a decent role as a potential love interest for Giorgio. Dubbed "Maria X" by him, she's witty and bright, yet not completely forthcoming about her lot in life.

Enlivened by a wonderful score by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis, "The Violent Professionals" is not among the very best of this genre, but it does show its audience a pretty good time. It wears its influence right on its sleeve, right up to the final sequence.

Seven out of 10.

When hard cop Luc Merenda discovers that the old cop he was just talking to that morning has been blown away by some escaped convicts, in addition to several other cops and an child, Luc dispenses justice the only way he knows how - by gunning the bad guys down in cold blood in front of all his colleagues.

His superior tells Luc to cool it, then goes off to blow the lid on something he's discovered, getting himself murdered in the process. Now Luc's mad as hell and suspended from the force to boot, so he does the only thing he can - poses as a pimp to get access to a local gang as a getaway driver. That's a plan so daft that you'd have to bitch slap an awful lot of people to get there...and it works.

Sure, Luc got a couple of women killed by accident when he called the cops on that robbery (plus the boyfriend of a junky girl who helps him out, plus I guess he gets her cooled too when I think about it), but it does get him noticed by local legitimate businessman Richard Conte, who might employ him, but wants him to demonstrate some mad GTA San Andreas type skills behind the wheel of a car. Does Luc feel guilty about those two women? I don't think he had the time.

Of course, this is no straightforward film where Luc just gets his revenge on the bad guys, there's also some politics involved, as it seems the gang are more interested in causing as much havoc as possible than grabbing money, and someone may even be pulling Richard Conte's strings too.

Although not up there with the best of the crime films, Violent Professionals is still a good film if you like these kind of things. You know, car chases, people firing guns at each other, Richard Conte's terrible stunt double, Luc Merenda violently assaulting everyone, funky music, smoking. Luc Merenda by the way looks like a really skinny Arnie and is very good at staring at things.

Luciano Rossi turns up at the beginning to get himself shot too.

So far I've seen five of these 70's Italian crime thrillers, 3 of them being straight up, Don Siegel and William Friedkin-influenced "cop on the edge with an axe to grind" Dirty Harry rip-offs. Out of those three, all of which are great, this has got to be the one with the coolest story-line (the other two being "High Crime" and "Violent Naples," to give you an idea of the standard here). While it is neither perfect nor entirely realistic, it is action-packed, bloody and riveting, a cocktail of elements common to the genre. And this particular "cop-on-the-edge," played by Luc Merenda, is so on-the-edge that he "poses" as a pimp muscling in on prostitution rackets with the facility of an old pro, gets innocent bystanders killed without hardly batting an eye, and cold-bloodedly executes surrendering criminals in front of the entire police department!

While he lacks quite the level of charisma and intensity delivered by Franco Nero or Maurizio Merli, Merenda holds his own. The primary reason he is able to do so here (the two secondary are Sergio Martino's competence in directing pulse-pounding action and the fact that the extremity I've come to expect from these films is as present here as anywhere) is the sucker-punch, no, make that downright subversive plot-line. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that what appears to be shaping up into a slanted portrayal of fanatical domestic terrorists (not that groups like the Red Brigade need any slanting to look bad, just that dishonesty bugs me even if it's on the right side) proves later to be something entirely different. The ending of this film, while it would be typical in another context, blew me away.

To top it off, you've got a killer score by the mad De Angelis brothers (if you've seen "Keoma," note that it helps that the only song with words isn't translated into English), and the only fatal car crash I've ever seen in an action movie where the car doesn't inexplicably burst into flames. Three cheers for this gleefully brutal mayhem-fest with the added plus of an intelligent plot!

THE VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS (Sergio Martino - Italy 1973).

Not all too interesting Dirty Harry variation from Sergio Martino in this crime thriller, starring Luc Merenda as a tough smooth-guy cop who goes undercover as a wheels man to infiltrate a ring of cop-killin' bank robbers.

The main problem is main man Luc Merenda who has little charisma and is either permanently smiling or desperately trying to look tough. Either way, his repertoire is a bit limited. The unimaginative screenplay by Ernesto Gastaldi is entirely short on logic. This is less urgent when writing horror or giallos, but the actions of police and crime bosses are supposed to contain some kind of logic, since they're driven by greed and money. In the world of organized crime, there's usually little room for vague motives, but here, most actions lack any kind of motivation. Even a bank robbery is carried out so incredibly clumsy, it was beyond me why the bank robbers were even surprised things went wrong.

Occasionally, it's a pretty lively affair with lots of action with some spectacular car chases (one of them probably took half the budget of the entire film), but some of these exciting set pieces can't save this from being a bore most of the time, with Merenda driving around in his car aimlessly or beating the living crap out of everyone he meets to get some answers about his chief's killing. In most cases, the answers don't add up to much or didn't make any sense to me. The English dubbing wasn't a big help in that department either.

Camera Obscura --- 5/10