Gangster Squad plunges you into Los Angeles in 1949-50 in its first minutes. You watch as a tough-looking man watches a fresh young girl, just arrived on the train, is offered an audition by a seedy-sounding guy. She can’t believe her good luck and the audience is on the edge of leaping up to warn her, when the seedy fellow drops the expected bomb: yep, the acting she’ll be doing is horizontal, on behalf of local organized crime interests. The tough guy springs into action and rough, and violent, justice is done.

After the fight, we learn that the tough guy is police officer Jack O’Mara (Josh Brolin) and he has just broken a truce with gang kingpin Mickey Cohen, a truce that has been lucrative for many corrupt LA cops. Part of the tension in the film comes from never knowing which cop is straight and which cop is crooked, and whether the straight ones can stay straight or the crooked ones can straighten out. Lives hang in the balance.

A cop who won’t respect the modus vivendi with the local thugs is no use on regular duty, but LA police chief Bill Parker has another plan: let’s take a group of cops that are combat veterans (as many were so soon after the war) off-the-books. O’Mara takes command. They put down their badges and pick up guns, knives, blunt instruments of numerous kinds, inflammable accelerants, illegal wiretaps, and, in short, all the arms and accoutrements of a criminal gang. Their mission: just as Mickey Cohen’s gang has crushed the smaller LA gangs and driven the Chicago Outfit out of LA with remorseless, sickening violence, to bring the methods of total war down upon the head of Mickey Cohen.

For the next couple of hours, they do, to the delight of the audience.

The weapons are period-correct and are mostly used in period-correct fashion. The cops have revolvers, a 1911, Tommy Guns. One old timer, played by Robert Patrick, carries a single-action .45 LC. “I’ll dance with the one that brung me,” he says when offered an upgrade. The crooks have Tommies, too, but also a variety of mostly ex-Axis hardware. It seems like a P-38 in the hand can make any bad guy more sinister, something movie makers in that period knew well. And the pistols are fired one-handed, as they would have been; no one really pushed 2-handed pistol shooting until about 1960. (Well, the Imperial Japanese Army had taught a solid isoceles stance, but whatever master instructors it had had gone down in a series of forlorn hope banzai charges, and didn’t contribute to postwar instruction).

Due to Hollywood’s sudden coyness about guns and violence, it’s actually hard to find a still of the good-guy actors blasting away, but trust us: of the two hours of the movie, a good forty minutes is spent going BANG.

There are a few scenes that are so over the top with gunfire they approach inadvertent comedy, especially a climactic gun battle in a hotel.

The movie is incredibly violent, the sort of gratuitous, fetishistic violence that makes you wonder if the director is all there. He probably is, but he’s trying to ape Quentin Tarantino. Or maybe he isn’t (all there, that is). Maybe he pulled too many wings off flies when he was a kid. Excitable boy, they all said.

Actors and Acting

The performances are the equal of the fast-moving script, with an unusual trio of stars and characters driving the film. Brolin as O’Mara is the Hollywood tough guy that films have been lacking in the recent era of pretty-boy leading men. Ryan Gosling (speaking of)) plays the sidekick, Jerry Wooters. Handsome, weak and conflicted, his character’s ultimate loyalty is a question throughout the film. And Sean Penn tells us where his career is going — characteractorstan — delivering con brio an over-the-top villain portrayal.  Penn’s Mickey Cohen is a viiolent, evil, sick monster; made that way by a violent, evil and sick childhood but now, in middle age, taking a perverted delight in the sickness. Either Penn is really a nasty piece of work and calls on that in the role, or he’s a much better actor than we’ve ever given him credit for before. At the final climactic battle of the forces of good and evil, by that point we were so full of loathing for Penn’s character that we not only wanted Brolin’s to beat the snot out of him, we didn’t want him to stop, and when he has Cohen at gunpoint you can feel the blood-lust of the theater audience calling, Caligula-style, for the coup de grace. Cohen, as played by Penn, is that kind of villain. Emma Stone has a great and complex role as the mobster’s girl looking for a way out — very reminiscent of Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in the 1983 Scarface remake, so much so that one wonders if it was the writers’ intention.

How accurate is it, and how PC?

We were surprised to learn that there is a non-fiction book, Gangster Squad, and that the movie hewed close to the book in many things. Because it felt like the story was a self-conscious attempt to make a Golden Age of Film movie. Naturally the real story is deeper and more interesting; the real O’Mara was a secondary figure in the squad; the real Cohen, far from being the wiry juggernaut of distilled evil that Penn delivers, was a podgy schlub, who finally went to Alcatraz not for murder, but because the IRS caught up with him on tax evasion. No one is ever going to make a movie about the perilous calculations of revenue agents.

But there really was a Gangster Squad, a group of cops that put their badges down and went to war with the Mob on a deniable basis. O’Mara and Wooters were real men. They were run off-the-books by the Police Chief, who set it up much as depicted by Nick Nolte in the movie.

The PC is, for a Hollywood outing, rather mild. The Gangster Squad must have a token black cop, and a token Mexican-American one. This is 1949 we’re talking about here, when letting negroes, as they were called then, into baseball was still a new and radical idea. Truman had just ordered the Army desegregated the year before — and the Army wouldn’t do it until after a badly-led segregated unit performed poorly in Korea in 1950. So the tokenism rings false (even though the actors playing the cops do a good job and their characters, especially Anthony Mackie’s Officer Coleman Harris, are plausibly written).  Probably the most-PC facet of the movie is a tiny anachronism: the very low incidence of smoking. This was 1949, of course: airliners had ashtrays in the cockpits for the pilots, as well as in every passenger armrest.

The War Veterans angle

The movie makes a big deal about the fact that O’Mara, Wooters and the others were — as they were in real life — war veterans. They fought for freedom overseas, they weren’t going to let Mickey Cohen take it from them at home. For Hollywood to portray veterans as anything other than A) sick, mentally ill murderers or ticking time bombs or B) needy, dependent losers whining into the lapels of their old field jackets, is highly unusual and ought to be encouraged. They don’t always act like combat veterans moving under fire, but then, it is a movie.

One last element of concern

This movie is based on one of the oldest tropes in the Boy’s Book of Tropes that Hollywood writers and directors grow up (or don’t) reading: good men must do evil things better than evil men, to restore the good in the world. In this case, cops must throw adherence to the law away to beat organized crime, and they do. They kill wantonly, they beat and burn and destroy. They disdain warrants. They bug and wiretap to their heart’s content.

To put it in Special Forces terms: if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.

Again, this is common in movies. But we’re not the only ones who watch these movies; so do police, intelligence officers, and federal agents. You wonder if it gets into their decision loop. For example, the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious was named after a series of movies in which a rogue cop wantonly breaks the law, half because he thinks he needs to to catch the bad guy (who, in the first movie, he then lets go), half for the sheer joy of it. In the actual operation, ATF agents supplied many thousands of weapons to extremely violent Mexican drug cartels, in an attempt to counterweight other cartels and — amazingly — to induce Congress to move on ATF’s preferred legislation by increasing violent crime. (Savor that distrtbing thought for a moment).

Recenty, a newspaper investigation exposed ATF’s Operation Fearless in St. Paul,MN Milwaukee, Wisconsin, (thanks to a commenter for the correction), a disaster from end to end, which poured untold tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars into criminal coffers, paying so much for stolen goods and contraband that criminals energetically acquired more, and losing control, in true ATF style, of tens of thousands of dollars worth of materials and an unknown number of firearms. One firearm known to be lost and not recovered was a full-auto agency M4 that was in a case in an agent’s undercover vehicle. The (married) agent left the vehicle in a coffee shop parking lot and met another (married) agent for a sexual liaison; three guns were stlolen from the G-ride while they were off making little ATF agents. Once again, the ill-considered, ill-led operation took as its logo the logo of a recent, violent film (Stallone’s The Expendables).

While the leadership vacuum at all levels of ATF is terribly far afield for a movie review, one can’t help being concerned with how movies that show noble cops reaching noble ends by very ignoble means impact the minds of those agents in agencies that do not have rigorous assessment and selection processes, and that do not bring agents up with firm and inspiring leadership. ATF is typical of many bureaucracies, in that “firm and inspiring” are not traits it seeks in leaders. (“Obsequious and complaisant,” perhaps).

But then, is the movie really the problem? This movie can have no negative impact on an agent in an agency that has good selection and assessment and, especially, good leadership. So to blame the directors or Josh Brolin for what some badged cretin does in a few years as “Operation Gangster Squad” is probably unfair to the moviemakers. They’re entertainers, not moral beacons.

Overall

We enjoyed it and think you will, too, if only for the period cars, clothes, architecture, and ambience (Angelenos in particular will love that, although they’ll weep at the uncongested streets). We did check out Rotten Tomatoes to see what the media’s critics, and they hated it (33%), but most of their hate seems to be concern-trolling over the violence. (Hollywood has lost the art of making a character look evil or tough unless he can dismember somebody, though, so what’re you gonna do?). Audience ratings ran the exact opposite of critics — 2/3 pro,1/3 con.

Note: Saturday Matinee 2013 No. 4 (corrected) never went up due to the reviewer having a heart attack in the middle of the film. When he went to resume the paused DVD after recovery, the DVD had been ruined and we haven’t gotten to the end of that film yet. Sometimes life happens when you’re making other plans.

We opened this up after skimming the reviews, and zanged it into the DVD player. Because we didn’t read the reviews — we often disagree with reviewers, and most of the reviewers who had seen this film were the sort we disagree with most constantly, the guys who bray about deconstruction of juxtaposition — we were expecting, from the title and blurb, an action-loaded spy flick, set in World War II.

It was a different kind of film. It is a spy film, but a more realistic one (it is based on a true story). There are no guns and little action. There is tension, and a very great deal of talk; it feels a lot longer than its 1 hour 45. Oh, and it’s all in French. Except for the parts that are in Russian. We can follow both languages, but still found the subtitles highly useful, although incomplete and often a little “off,” as if the subtitle guy was not a native speaker of any of the three languages. So if you click back to whence you came, we’ll understand: this isn’t the usual WeaponsMan.com movie review fare. But if you stick around, we’ll tell you about a film we wound up, in the end, enjoying.

Setting and Characters

By 1930, almost everyone had forgotten the White Russians who had fought bitterly against the Reds in the 1918-22 Civil War. They had been driven into diaspora from the United States to China. As many of them stemmed from the aristocratic class of Russians that always looked to France for ideas and fashions, Paris became the center of their organizations, their social life, and their hopeless schemes of return to Russia.

We said almost everyone. The exception, of course, was the Reds and their ruthless leader, Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvilii, better known by his Red conspirator handle, Stalin. To say Stalin kept a grudge is like saying Michael Jordan played a little hoops. Even before his paranoid consolidation of power in the Great Terror of 1937-38, Stalin had started the long-standing Russian of whacking and kidnapping exiles and overseas opponents. The story takes place among Russian exiles, and the central character, Fyodor Voronin, is the secretary of a league of White Army veterans. He was a general at 22. “That’s better than Napoleon!” one of his French neighbors notes. “Well, my career didn’t last as long,” Voronin deadpans. Well, not his military career.

Alexander Kuteypov – one of many real-world White leaders abducted and whacked in the thirties.

Voronin is played with bipolar perfection by Serge Renko, and his doting wife, Arsinoê, by Katerina Didaskalou. They are a devoted couple; elegant, educated, and attractive, although far from  wealthy. Bad investments have erased the White Russian treasure. While Voronin is always engaged in the intrigues of his job — the Soviets, Nazis, and France’s left-wing Popular Front government all have an interest in the remnant Whites — his wife paints pretty, but unfashionable, portraits and life. As the film opens, the mystery of the kidnapping of General Kuteypov hangs over the Whites. Everyone suspects the Soviets, who are the only logical suspects, but proof is lacking. Kuteypov is an actual historical figure, and his kidnapping was indeed carried out by the NKVD in 1930.

As the thirties grind on, director Éric Rohmer keeps us up with current events through contemporary newsreels and, sometimes to the viewer’s vexation, through long expository discussions among the characters.  The French government is taken over by a left-wing Popular Front, incompetent in a way that only a French or third-world Francophone government can really pull off. The Nazis rise in Germany, a radical group that drew its inspiration, although not its ideology, from the totalitarian Soviets. The Spanish Civil War offers the nations of Europe a place to shake down their military weapons and tactics, a dress rehearsal for the horrors yet to come. And, most ominously for our characters, the Great Terror begins in Russia with the first show trials organized by Yezhov and Vyzhinsky under the direction of Stalin.

Without plunging deep into spoilers, we learn that even strongly-expressed ideological beliefs may be subject to pragmatic revision — or discarded. That the characters of those we’ve become invested in may not be quite what they seem. Maybe we’re rooting for bad guys. Maybe there are no good guys. We see the tragedy of misplaced trust, on several levels.

At the end of the film, we observed that this was much, much closer to the real world of espionage — tawdry betrayals, tragic endings — than the usual Hollywood depiction. That means, of course, that this film is more of an intellectual workout and less of an emotional reward than the usual spy flick — James Bond cavorting through countesses’ bedrooms, for example. If you read our recommendations for the gunplay and explosions, this might not be your film.

As it is, we’ll take a good brain test like this from time to time… maybe once for every five spatter-pattern fireball flicks. Now, where did we put Chuck Norris Saves Everything XVIII?

Weapons?

Nope, none. There isn’t as much as a carving knife or revolver in the case, although the implied threat of state power, legitimate and clandestine, suffuses the entire film. Even though there is violence and death, it happens off screen, and in one case to a character who is unseen on screen as Godot on stage.

The real Miller-Skoblin case

One of the benefits of the DVD is a mini-documentary, featuring an interviewer, a relative of one of the players (Iréne Skobline), and and a French historian of the period, that explains some things about the Miller-Skoblin case. Yevgeny Miller was the senior general, and Nikolai Skoblin the Voronin character. Much more information on the actual case is available online and in books by historians of the era and particularly of Soviet espionage and black operations. There is no question that the real Skoblin was a traitor to his White allies, and that he was instrumental in the kidnapping and murder of Miller. It’s also agreed that Skoblin met his end soon after — but the Russian archives are silent on where and when. At the time, the early stages of the Great Terror, the Yezhovshchina, named after the NKVD head, were in effect. Many exiles were lured back to the USSR to be murdered. Those that couldn’t be lured were kidnapped or killed in place.

No one familiar with the Soviet security organs of the time thinks that Skoblin died of old age. His actual wife was convicted — unlike the film’s Arsinoê, she was apparently blatantly guilty — and died in prison.

What we liked, and didn’t

The acting was superb across the board: the two key characters of Voronin and  are perfectly played, but even the bit players live their parts (it probably helps not to be familiar with these European actors). Gradually you see the personal character of the characters emerge, and the web of deception keeps you guessing until you realize, before the characters on screen come to grips with the idea, that someone you have been watching is really treacherous. Bad things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people, and the movie ends with other nad people on top. But whom is the agent betraying, to whom? Is he a double or a triple agent? And how will it end for him?

In the end, the movie hastily ties up many of the loose ends, but leaves as many completely unresolved. That’s probably appropriate for the source material. It’s a gray movie about a gray world.

It’s also a long and slow movie. Is that the fault of the material or the auteur? Does his intended audience, which probably doesn’t include us, expect that? Not sure. It was great, though, to see a movie that was a stylistic and intellectual stretch. Beats hell out of Chuck Norris Kicks Ass CLXXII or something.

Something to find and read

The Wikipedia page on the Skoblin-Miller affair suggests that it was not only the inspiration for Triple Agent, but also for a 1943 story by Vladimir Nabokov, The Assistant Producer. It is perhaps best known as his first English-language-first publication. All English versions of this story before 1995 have been short two paragraphs, and we think the one at this link is one of those… but we don’t have a 1995 edition for comparison. But nonetheless, you started this link with a bit of an art-house movie; and we end full circle with a bit of an art-house writer on the same subject. So aren’t you glad you stuck around?

SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden is a quickie made-for-TV movie, on DVD in the stores now and receiving a publicity blitz, which you could charitably say is meant to capitalize on the much larger publicity wave the much costlier theatrical release Zero Dark Thirty is currently riding. (If you were more cynical than charitable, you could say it is meant to deceive low-information DVD buyers. But let’s give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, as we have much to criticize them for without lapsing into low cynicism).

The movie was made in a rush, to quickly exploit public interest in the death of bin Laden. The filmmakers say they also meant to honor the men and women of the military and intelligence services. Finally, they don’t say this, but they clearly intended to honor the President and promote his reelection. They succeed mostly in the first and third objectives, and they make an effort on the second, which is appreciated.

The original name, Code Name Geronimo, was dumped some time during production. There’s art with that title on the net if you look for it.

Despite a week or ten days of actors’ boot camp, which included live-firing weapons, most of the actors don’t look or sell their parts very well. There are exceptions — the guy who plays the never named Lieutenant Commander springs to mind — but most of these guys look like Actors Playing SEALS. The “combat action” is weak, and it’s especially weak in a scene that is supposed to be in Afghanistan on a previous deployment.

Sometimes they get details just right — team members carrying a tourniquet on their vests. Sometimes they get them wrong — nerf vests, and in one scene, an actor or extra is carrying a bulky equipment bag… under his arm, because it’s clearly packed with styrofoam packing noodles or some other prop-room substitute for war gear. That was just carelessness.

The script includes a scene we never would have believed had not a SEAL acquaintance assured us that it does happen — an officer and a senior petty officer working out a disagreement with a physical fight. That’s pretty foreign to our Army Special Forces way of doing things. (Normal disagreements are worked out by the team, and even a galactically stupid order by a galactically unpopular officer is usually followed, if it’s not life-threatening. Individual NCOs who can’t handle a particular officer find a new place to excel, usually on another team in the same company; individual officers who cannot establish bonds of mutual trust and respect with their teams are normally advised in a closed-doors meeting by the NCO leadership or the team as a whole to go pursue their careers elsewhere. In egregious cases, they get a frank explanation of what “or else” means in this environment).

There are three interlocking threads to the story: the individual SEAL element’s preparation and execution of the mission; the tracking of bin Laden through his courier “Ahmed al-Kuwaiti” by CIA analysts; and the actions on the ground of CIA officers. As in Zero Dark Thirty, a character based on a particular (and self-promoting) CIA analyst, stands in for all the intelligence community. Two CIA officers stand in for all the members of the clandestine service who have pursued bin Laden on-the-ground relentlessly, tracking tens of thousands of “sightings” which turned out to be nothing — and a few that turned out to be the actual target.

The script follows, mostly, the facts as released by the White House. These facts have been disputed, including by SEALS that were on the mission, particularly “Mark Owen” in his book, No Easy Day.  But it is one clear coherent story of the raid, and the producers can’t really be faulted for sticking to it.

One place where they went out of the way to mess up was the story of the Pakistani doctor who tried to get a blood sample from the kids in the compound, to determine if they were bin Laden’s children. The story is told in a few minutes, without ever naming Dr Shakeel Afridi, a Pashtun who risked his life for the success of our mission, and who has paid terribly for it. He was abandoned by the US and the CIA, and White House kibitzers leaked his story to the media and to the Hollywood teams making both movies. The Pakistani ISI quickly grabbed him, sentenced him to 33 years in prison, and then conducted the formality of a trial, with the peculiarly Pakistani feature of lawyers who cannot see or talk to their client. Dr Afridi has been tortured in prison, and guards who tried to help him have gotten the same treatment. None of this is in the movie. You never find out what happened to the guy. Unless you google his name, or read our review.

One way a short script is padded to film length is by interposed scenes “interviewing” the characters, in which they mostly talk about their feelings. These scenes don’t add much except time to the film, and you get a definite sense that the coach (Director John Stockwell) is running out the clock here.

The weapons are not particularly accurately portrayed. They are standard Hollywood rental stuff, AKs for the bad guys and AR-15s for the good guys, and a lot of what we think of as “standard effects-reel gun sounds” are dubbed in. There’s a lot more firing in long automatic bursts than would actually happen. The range scenes aren’t atrocious, although they don’t do a good job of showing a high training state or showing training progression — just shooting at a few meters’ distance against paper targets.

Some of the “night” scenes have that horribly fake look, shot in the daytime with a filter, what cinematographers call “day for night”. C’mon guys… if you can’t fake it, make it.

The political scenes feel grafted on, as if they were superimposed on the shooting script late in production or even in post. They not only included material meant to boost the President, but stuff to bash his election opponent. If you’re one of his partisans, you might actually like this, but there’s too much of his singsong, left-teleprompter right-teleprompter delivery of political speeches. A sound bite would have done it, we don’t need a whole hunk of official propaganda footage of The Great Man speaking orating. Contra the film, it wasn’t a braver or riskier decision to be the guy saying “yes” or “no” than to be the guy actually kicking the door.

The film was mostly shot in New Mexico, looking to save money versus overpriced California. The terrain of neither closely resembles Afghanistan or Pakistan. The scenes of the surveillance were shot in India with Indian actors, and these, in fact, have some of the best verisimilitude of the whole thing, despite there being a few Indian “tells” like license plates. (The Indian actors are really good, more so than their American counterparts in this. Maybe Bollywood should have made the whole movie).

Bottom line: this is another one not to spend real money on. Netflix queue, OK, if you’re out of other ideas; but not the DVD. At least not until it’s in the $5 bin. Maybe it’s not completely dreadful, but it’s not very good. It was a bit depressing to watch the making-of extra on the DVD and hear how serious the cast and crew were, and how hard they were trying. With the amount of effort they put in, they should certainly have achieved better. Even with the budget and the rush to airtime, their results can’t be excused: better films have been made for less.

It’s rare that we address a comedy in these reviews, probably too rare. Now, we do love our screen mayhem (our entire life has been the unsuccessful pursuit of analog sex and digital violence, only to have it actually eventuate the other way round). But we like a good laugh as much as the next guy, and a police comedy seems fit to review on a day where we’ve already posted a cop story that makes you go awwwwww.

Hot Fuzz is part of an unusual trilogy: the first satirized zombie movies, this one, cop buddy flicks, and the next, due out in 2013, apparently combines a pub crawl terminating at a pub called The End of the World with — what else? — the actual End of the World. So our guess is that it will be taking the mickey out of disaster films, but we’ll see. In any event, the first two are more worth watching than almost any of the films they’re mocking, so we’re spring loaded to get our tickets for the next one.

Hot Fuzz may not make you go awwww but it will make you laugh if you have any vestige of a pulse. Cop comedies are scarcely new, with a long history going back to the silent era’s Keystone Kops shorts, through the Police Academy franchise (which like many franchises, deteriorated so that the first one yields the best howls), to the Lthal Weapon franchise (ditto), to something like half of Jackie Chan’s brilliant work. Hot Fuzz is a British take on the cop comedy, starring the buddy pair of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, best known to Americans from the zombie comedy, Shaun of the Dead. (If you liked Shaun, don’t even bother reading the rest of the review, just punch out and order Hot Fuzz now). Pegg is an extremely versatile actor, though; you may not even recognize him but he was Montgomery Scott in the new Start Trek prequel films and 1st Sergeant Evans in Band of Brothers.

Pegg (who played the title character in “Shaun”) is Nick Angel, a water-walking, too good to be true London cop with a record surpassing every member of his class — and every other rozzer in the big city. As the movie opens, a wry retrospective on his career so far — the deft, sometimes surprising cuts and rapid-fire action keep viewers engaged — delivers him to New Scotland Yard, where he gets the welcome news he’s being promoted — and the unwelcome news he’s being transferred. To Sandford, Gloucestershire, a fictional town in a real southwestern English countryside county.

The development of the characters and the rapid-fire dialogue are what makes Hot Fuzz worth watching, and the transfer scene, with Angel trying to wriggle out of the assignment, is the first one that makes it crystal clear that you’re in for that kind of film. The next such scene has Nick dealing with his ex-girlfriend, played uncredited and behind a surgical mask by Cate Blanchett. She has left him because of his monomaniacal, by-the-book pursuit of police excellence.

“You’re married to the Force!” she charges.

“The ‘Service.’ We’re supposed to call it ‘The Service,’ now,” he corrects her. “Regulation…”  and explains the name is less threatening, completely missing, of course, that that kind of excessive devotion to duty is just why she booted him.

Checking in to a Sandford hotel, Nick has an encounter with a hotel clerk that is laden with double meanings (not sexual ones). On one level, it’s an exchange of crossword clues. On another, it’s foreshadowing with a clue-by-four.

As the film zips along, now-Sergeant Angel finds himself with nothing much to do except run in misbehaving kids and follow up on missing-domestic-fowl reports. His new co-workers are a sad collection of time-servers, cynics, and no-hopers, the most appalling of which is PC Danny Butterman (Frost), who is drunk, incompetent, and obsessed with Hollywood cop films. “Have you ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?” Danny asks, among many other annoying questions. Nick’s success — and his former membership in the Metropolitan Police’s small firearms squad — has made him an object of hero worship — at least by Danny. The rest of the cops jeer at him behind his back.

Of course, you know that the movie has to culminate in the biggest, most ourtageous, and spectacular gunfight imaginable. We don’t think telling you that is much of a spoiler, because how you get from here to there is quite amazing. In the actual gunfight, Pegg and Wright manage to cram in scenes that directly reference (and mock) a broad range of standard Hollywood canned action film tropes — and even some spaghetti-western ones. It’s all good fun.

Some Americans do find some of the English accents hard to follow, but most of the speaking roles speak in common and clear accents — there’s actually scenes with unintelligible accents requiring a translator. Not for the viewers: for the characters. (Fortunately for us Yanks, they didn’t set it in Yorkshire).

How realistic is the gunplay? Er… it’s quite horribly bad, but deliberately so. The writers (Pegg and director Edgar Wright) lifted as much as possible from action films. Indeed, the action films themselves become a plot point, because of Danny’s obsessive viewing of them and his resulting fantasies, and Nick’s lack of interest in them and their unrealistic portrayal of the routine police work he loves. There are some interesting guns, but an excess of Hollywood stainless and chrome junk.

The villains’ conspiracy is utterly irrational, and as events develop they get more and more unbeleivable, but by that point the film has sucked you in and you’re laughing so hard you don’t care.

Pegg and Frost are perfect as the flawed hero who needs to loosen up and the ate-up sidekick who needs to grow up,a “bromance” with real chemistry. But the rest of the cast –  there are dozens of speaking roles, some with only a single line, but each one sounds just right — adds immeasurably to the strength of the movie. You’ll recognize many familiar faces from Shaun, and there’s a brief appearance as one of Nick’s London superiors by Martin Freeman, now appearing as the Hobbit. But the tour de force is Timothy Dalton’s supermarket owner Simon Skinner (many of the characters have names like Skinner, Hacker, or Cutter), an over-the-top establishment villian that recalls some of the classic comedic villainy of David Niven or Terry Thomas, 50 years or more ago. Dalton (at least with Pegg and Wright writing and Wright directing) is absolutely the Establishment-guy-with-a-dark-(funny)-secret to take up the John Cleese mantle and take it in a new direction.

Bottom line: see it. We were very lucky to get it for short money at a used video store. Great entertainment for a group of people. There are tons of extras on the version of the DVD we got, which comes in a blue and black cardboard box.

Jules is the blogger we miss the most, and not just because he has a brother in SF. Or even that he was accused of war crimes. (If nobody accuses you of that, you’re ineffective. But Jules got accused of such as a war correspondent. No pedestal in the hemisphere is high enough for this Australian-American just plain good guy).

But we understand that his day job for a struggling newspaper, and his family, take priority. Work and family trump blogging around here, too.

Fortunately, while he seems to rule out a return to the blogmill, Jules has jumped back onto his reading-list page to update us on what he’s reading, and what some of his many combat-vet friends recommend. When he does this, we always learn stuff. Even though he describes it as just  ”some quick-and-dirty book lists and literary notes from several veterans of past wars plus one former combat correspondent,” it’s a veritable feast for the avid war reader. He began with his current reading matter:

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin, ahead of the weekend’s planned viewing of Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” Great book, and an interesting approach to presidential history that is highly relevant, maybe even sets a benchmark, as we watch another cabinet shaping up in contentious times. Yeah, it’s a war read. Related, different:  Lincoln’s Ladder to the Presidency: The Eighth Judicial Circuit by Guy C. Fraker. Sounds like good history on Lincoln, the young nation and the law, by someone intimate with the 8th Circuit.

Unfortunately, Goodwin is one of those celebrity historians who is known for her wordsmithing, not her research, so we’ll continue to give the book a pass. Moreover, she has a nasty habit of “research” that turns out to consist of copying large passages of other, less-celebrated, historians’ work. The other book sounds a bit lawyerly for us. Had John Wilkes Booth just gone around shooting lawyers, and not the President, there’d probably be an equestrian statue of him in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. Will be interesting to read in concert with former SEAL Kevin Maurer’s controversial No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden.

We don’t know where Jules gets, “SEAL Kevin Maurer.”  As we understand it, Maurer was the writer who helped the SEAL with the book. Anyway, we’ve read both books, and found them both limited. No Easy Day is a shooter’s-eye view. The Finish is a work of Washington leakery and coming from Bowden, who made his bones with a series of incredible deep reportage in the Philidelphia Inquirer that became Black Hawk Down, it’s a disappointment. Jules’s next couple of recommendations were news to us, and we’ll be ordering them (through the links on Jules’s site, to give him the Amazon credit by way of thanks).

Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-1975 , George J. Veith, who reports:  “In April 2001, my friend and translator, Merle Pribbenow, and I visited MG Le Minh Dao, the last commander of the ARVN 18th Division. We interviewed him about the battle of Xuan Loc, which took place in April 1975. His unit stood their ground in some very heavy combat, and our article on the battle was published in January 2004 in the ‘Journal of Military History.’ Dao was so pleased with our efforts that he begged me turn the paper into a book on the final two years of the war. He emphatically told me that the RVNAF had fought well, and they were not the corrupt cowards so often portrayed in the American media. Thus began a ten-year journey of research and writing that finally culminated in ‘Black April.’”

Possibly the greatest historical shame of our time, the abandonment of Indochina, though it’s never too late to rack up another one.

God save us from that, but we’ll definitely need Him to pull that off, given the sort of bozos we send to DC. And here’s a subject that is seldom enough treated in books:

Pacific Time on Target: Memoirs of a Marine Artillery Officer, 1943-1945 , a private memoir by Christopher S. Donner, written immediately post-war on his time as a Marine artillery officer and forward observer in the Solomons, Guam and Okinawa. Rediscovered, edited and presented by Knoxville, Tenn., lawyer Jack H. McCall Jr., whose father served in the same unit, 9th Marine Defense Battalion. A Stanford grad student, teacher and married father, Donner signed up after Pearl Harbor. An unsparing look by an educated, sophisticated observer at unspeakably brutal combat against a dug-in, determined enemy. A good companion to Sledge’s With the Old Breed.  (Update: Larry Gwin … 7th Cav Ia Drang vet/author, see his book list below … gives this one two thumbs up.)

via Jules Crittenden » Combat Reads.

We could go on and on — the next one on Jules’s list is also one we’re ordering — but there’s no justification for pilfering all of his post. We’ve already decapitated the poor thing, so flock to his site and RTWT.

Like Outside the Wire, today’s review subject is a documentary series available on DVD. In fact, we bought it at Wal-Mart in a 2-pack with J.D. Johannes’s Iraq documentary series, and we actually liked it better.

Don’t expect the flash of a Hollywood feature film (or even an independent film like Act of Valor or Saints and Soldiers). It is what it is, a series of documentaries that build into a wholesale history of the combat precision marksman — the sniper.

The first episode, Who is the Sniper?, discusses the personality, training, and equipment of a “generic” sniper. The second discusses employment and common mission profiles for dedicated snipers. The next four episodes provide a history of the sniper, from the American Revolution to today. (It is interesting that throughout these 235 or so years there has always been a place for a piece on the chessboard who fired at a slower rate but with a higher certainty of effect than his fellows in the rank and file).

The story is told by talking head, by field footage, and — from time to time — by reenactments. Some of the reenactments tend towards the cheesy. There are some errors that the tech-savvy viewer will get. (Advice to DVD packagers: do not juxtapose a tagline about the spirit of the American sniper” with the photo of a sniper team that is visibly not American, like these guys did on the back of the DVD. You will be made sport of. QED). There are current snipers (the USMC clearly cooperated with the filmmakers) and retired snipers.

We would have liked more on the gear and especially the technique of the various periods. We would have liked to see more on emerging and future technologies (sniping stands on the verge of a capabilities explosion today, in 2012).

If you are a sniper, or even if you are a veteran who has faced them, served with them, or deployed/employed them, you will probably not learn a great deal from this. We didn’t. But we enjoyed it nonetheless, we did learn things about Civil War snipers we hadn’t known (or perhaps had forgotten), and the price, in tandem with J.D. Johannes’s Outside the Wire, was somewhere around the intersection of dirt and cheap. Recommended.

It was a commenter here at Weaponsman.com that reminded us of this classic British TV series. Set in World War II, it follows the exploits and characters of the officer (one Brian Ash, played by Anthony Andrews) and men of 347 Section (Bomb Disposal), 87 Tunneling Company, Royal Engineers.

Brian Ash is a complicated and deep character, Everyman thrust into a realm of absurd and frightful “perverted science.” We do not meet him in the opening scenes: instead, we watch another bomb-disposal officer working on a fuze, ultimately trying to remove its locking ring with a hammer and chisel. And then — we cut from this scene to a happy young man driving an MG down wooded lanes. It is Brian Ash, and we are there with him as he finds out that he has been assigned to bomb disposal.

“Don’t you have to, er, volunteer for that?” Ash asks nervously.

“No, not really,” his superior tells him. But “Don’t worry. You’ll pick it up as you go.”

The time is 1940, the Blitz is on, and the British are coming to tems with their lack of preparation. The Tunneling Company was a relic of Great War static trench warfare, and so they were seized upon by planners and thrown into the blitz’s time-delayed underside. “Before the war,” several characters note at different times, “everyone assumed that all bombs dropped would, you know, go off. Everyone was wrong.”

There is a good bit on the technical side of the weapons they face and fear. The bomb themselves are inert as hammers — if the bomb tech can remove the fuze and the gaine safely. But at the start of the blitz, there was little technical knowledge and no known render-safe procedures. They had to be developed on the fly. We meet the ordinary Type 13 electric fuze, the time-delay Type 15, the anti-handling Type 17 and the terrifying Type 50, designed specifically to kill British bomb disposal crews. You see a bit of the technological “wizards’ war,” which is personified by an eccentric scientist whose daughter becomes Ash’s love interest.

Each episode cuts jarringly between events in normal London or country life, and the daily grind of bomb disposal. Most bombs are routine and can be blown in place. Only those that are most hazardously placed need to be rendered safe and removed. So each bomb that must be defused is not only high-stakes for the bomb disposal officer, but also for others.

The acting is great. Anthony Andrews is an underrated but quite excellent actor, and he’s perfect in the role of Brian Ash. The supporting actors hold up the film with the stolidity of rugby props. The late Jeremy Sinden (trivia note: one of the voices singing, “na na na nanana na” in the chorus of the Beatles’ Hey Jude) is picture perfect as a fun-loving but more experienced officer, Ivor Rogers, who shows Ash the ropes, and later succeeds to the command of the company. Scots actor Maurice Roëves is so perfect as the experienced Sergeant James that we checked his bio for evidence of military service (and found it).

Each episode has its own internal rhythm and pacing. Some are upbeat, some are dark, some end with a mixed feeling. All are intensely human. Best of all they’re all on a single set of four DVDs, available for under $20 from Amazon. Can you beat that? We can’t. This series gets our highest recommendation.

(Note: hastily published. Hope to add graphics and maybe polish text later).