So here’s a paired watch of two movies about bad cops.

First up is What Have They Done to Your Daughters? It’s a giallo (well, Wikipedia says it’s a hybrid giallo/poliziottesco, and okay, sure) by the same guy who did What Have You Done to Solange?. Like that one, it a) has a question for a title, and b) is a weird mix of moralizing and prurient.

The premise is, the police get a call that a girl is in trouble, and they go to a locked apartment, where they find her corpse naked and hanged. Naturally, they’re like “welp, that’s a suicide, all done here, wrapped this up,” without thinking twice about how they got a tip about something that happened in a locked room; but after some further facts come to light, they start to think that maybe there might be some foul play involved here.

The newspapers helpfully print front-page color photos of a naked dead girl (and I genuinely have no idea if this is a thing that would have happened in Italy in the 70s or not, but like: wtf), and the police begin investigating. As they start finding information about an underage sex trafficking ring that implicates powerful people, they’re told to drop the investigation; but then some murders start up as the people they’ve been questioning get killed by a cleaver-wielding motorcyclist in a black leather suit, and they at least try to solve those.

It’s got a great car chase in it, but despite not being particularly salacious by genre norms, making it about fourteen-year-old girls is very unpleasant, and it’s not good enough to make that pay off as social criticism.

Next up is Police Story, a Jackie Chan action comedy. He plays a cop in a department of extremely bad cops — as in What Have They Done…, they get told to stop investigating once they implicate powerful people; but Jackie Chan isn’t having this, and he angrily kidnaps the head of the police at gunpoint (a scene that I kept thinking was supposed to be an arranged mislead, but no: it’s just Chan’s character getting super emotional and deciding to point a gun at his coworkers and kidnap his boss; he’s the good guy, remember) and keeps the investigation going while he’s a fugitive. Huh.

Of course, Jackie Chan movies aren’t famous for their rigorous plotting and careful character work, but for their action. And the action here is legitimately good, with creative freedom that was only possible in the pre-CGI era by putting people in dangerous situations — like, when people fly off a roof, there’s no mid-fall cut, you just see them fall all the way. It’s striking and makes things feel real, but that’s pretty much because they are real, and idk how much you really want to celebrate people putting their health on the line for movie stunts. Maybe it’s cool that we have CGI now and don’t need to have people carted off on stretchers quite so much?

Still, Chan is great in the fight scenes and doing little stunts like parkouring over a gate. The humor doesn’t necessarily all land — it’s very broad and (let’s politely say) dated in some points — but it gets enough of a silly fun vibe to make the movie a good hang. But I suspect the era when this kind of stuff was really glorified as Peak Action Movie is well in the past.