This extravagantly horrid crime thriller has already been a significant hit in its home country of Poland. One can just about see why. Patryk Vega directs with the totalitarian confidence that wins careers in Hollywood. Every special forces assault is proceeded by swooping helicopter shots of sunlit Warsaw rooftops. The soundtrack throbs with dark ambient electronics and lush simulated strings. Expect to see Vega directing Fast and Furious 14. What a shame the film is such a muddle and so at home to casual sadism.
We begin with a brilliantly staged fight between football hooligans that sows seeds for future disenchantments. Four years later, mildly barbaric, Mohawk-headed police detective Majami (Piotr Stramowski) is attempting to dismantle a protection racket run by the implausibly named Granny (Boguslaw Linda). A great many men with huge bald heads hit one another while women cower in the shadows.
Displaying its origins as sequel to a 2005 TV series, Pitbull: New Order plays as if compacted into two hours from a sequence of 13 more coherent episodes. Characters pop up, have body parts removed and then vanish as suddenly as they arrived. Rather than traversing any sort of ordered narrative arc, the film tumbles along in disconnected fits and starts.
Some of the set pieces are genuinely impressive, but the reliance on random butchery eventually becomes exhausting. There is something of Brian De Palma's Scarface to the mayhem, but Pitbull lacks any of that film's Jacobean extravagance.
More worryingly, it conjures up the most depressingly unreconstructed set of female characters in any recent film: nagging harridans, calculating molls, psychopathic sex workers. In the course of the action, those women are shot in the back, have fingers bloodily removed and are smothered graphically with plastic bags. It all makes Sergio Leone seem like Chantal Akerman.
