The blue fury of the Metropolitan police

[fivemack]

I've started watching more DVDs, thanks to Blockbuster and to having Ben in the house of evenings; mostly things that I remember being vaguely entertaining as cinema trailers but never got round to seeing on the big screen.

Are there any films that end with the massive intervention of legitimate authority? After Hot Fuzz and Mr and Mrs Smith, I would be very refreshed to see something where the police exist, are summoned to scenes of inordinate mayhem, and don't give up until the perpetrator is caught; where Secret Society A and Secret Society B clash in Los Angeles and both end up trapped in road-blocked streets and detained by the LAPD; or where the characters engaged in diabolism end up encountering the wrath of God and transformed to pillars of salt.

I suppose Good Omens comes close to the last.

This may be like my main complaint with Grand Theft Auto, which is that the police give up too readily; repeatedly shooting policemen gets you the attention of the army, but this is an opportunity to rampage in a stolen tank rather than the certainty of long-range-rifle-borne instantaneous death.

It's probably difficult to write an engaging script which features the arrest, trial and detention of the hero, and 'shot by the SWAT team' is a somewhat sudden conclusion. But I'd just for once like to see something where the firing of a single shot is a major life-changing event.

Comments

[diffrentcolours]

Surely Hot Fuzz is the massive intervention of legitimate authority? A police sergeant and constable arresting a horde of gun-toting criminals?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

No, it's a pair of plastic (or possibly rubber; plastic might shatter if shot) superheroes in police uniforms shooting a horde of gun-toting criminals with the firearms skill of Imperial Stormtroopers. The ubervillain goes to trial, the henchmen to the morgue.

ewx has a point that Mafia films might be what I'm looking for; both Mafiosi and FBI agents are as fragile as humans. Or possibly the more serious kind of Western.

[diffrentcolours]

I have a feeling that you missed the point of Hot Fuzz.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Quite likely; I think that having Authority be comically incompetent is almost always tragic, I find the casual acceptance of what's clearly corruption in Yes, Minister pretty much unwatchable be it ever so well-written.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Prizzi's Honor is much better than Mr And Mrs Smith

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you should probably watch 25th Hour.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Dogma? Intervention of about as high an authority as you can get.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Michael Mann's Heat, sorta?

[darcydodo]

To some extent, "The Departed," kind of, I guess. :)

[zorac.livejournal.com]

I'd say that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would be top of the list, there. It ht has the ending that Mr and Mrs Smith looked like it was going to have (and then didn't).

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Monty Python's The Holy Grail?

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Mm, that was the one that came to mind for me too.

[simont]

Gosh, nobody has mentioned The Blues Brothers yet.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you are probably looking at the wrong sort of film. Hot Fuzz or Mr. and Mrs. Smith are not in any sense realist films (you point this out yourself), and to demand that they conform to reality is to ignore the fact that they are examples of particular genres whose raison d'etre is that they are set aside from reality.

I would recommend smaller-scale movies which purport to deal with real characters in real situations - my favourite film of the past few years is The Beat That My Heart Skipped, about small-scale gangsters in Paris, one of whom wants to become a concert pianist. I suppose this isn't entirely realistic, but it is non-realistic rather than unrealistic, if you see the distinction. The characters aren't bullet-proof, for a start.

M and I went to see Eastern Promises yesterday, which is a film about slightly-larger-scale gangsters in London, not one of whom wants to become any sort of orchestral musician, but which isn't very good.

I suppose the problem is the attempt to balance film as entertainment against the Hollywood assumption that entertainment means excess. If you want slick genre thrillers which are less unrealistic than Mr. and Mrs. Smith, how about Michael Mann? I think we went to see Heat together in the cinema, and it's three hours long, but Collateral is quite a good film in which the violence is plot-driven rather than excessive.