Country: Italy
Genre: Action
Director: Stelvio Massi
Year: 1974
Rating: 
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
I really wanted to like Emergency Squad. It has a lot of virtues. The characters are either colorful or charming, the score is a bizarre kind of Italian 70s disco which is so wrong that it’s funny, the great Tomas Milian is amusing as always in the role of the monosyllabic, cigar chomping Inspector Rivelli, but in the end, Emergency Squad is too polite and cautious, the last thing you want in an Poliziotteschi flick.
The plot is simple enough. A group of thieves hijack a payroll from a bank, cleverly disguising themselves as a film crew so that witnesses think they are witnessing a film shoot rather than a robbery. A cop is killed with a machine gun during the robbery and Inspector Rivelli, after examining one of the bullets dug out of the dead cop, has it compared to one of the slugs taken from the body of his wife, who was an innocent bystander killed in another robbery a few years back. Rivelli has a hunch that the shooter in both cases is the same man.
As the cops close in on the gang, the crooks do their best to evade the police, hiding out in an apartment, fleeing in a car disguised as priests, improvising a rest stop through a home invasion, and so on. During the home invasion sequence, as soon as we see the ripe daughter wearing a miniskirt, she might as well have a sign reading “Gratuitous Nudity” around her neck, and director Stelvio Massi doesn’t disappoint us.
The problem is that Massi parcels out the perversity and violence parsimoniously. In the best Poliziotteschi flicks, like Almost Human, there’s an outrage every few minutes. Taboos are cheerfully and repeatedly broken and the filmmakers revel in melodrama and general tastelessness. The energy carries you past the low budgets, the dated acting styles, the 70s reliance on zoom lenses, and the sometimes awkward action choreography.
Without the excesses and energy, all that Poliziotteschi films like Emergency Squad have to offer is a charmingly clunky aesthetic, and that just isn’t enough.
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