One of the more clichéd plots in Eurocrime cinema is the small time cop fighting his way through waves of seemingly petty criminals before discovering that there is a crooked cop in on the act and a shadowy organisation controlling it all. This is the plot of this film, and the plot of The Big Racket, Silent Action, Violent Professionals, Killer Cop, and so on and so forth.
This time round Klaus Kinski is part of a hit squad who organise the arrival in Italy of a New York hitman who dresses up as a cop, heads to a hospital where a mafia Don is in custody, whacks the capo, then for good measure whacks the two guys helping him before being sent back to the US by Kinski and his mates. Please note that Kinski does not speak a single word of dialogue in this film, so it's easy money for him, the lazy creepy bastard.
Problems arise immediately when the hitmen twig that an employee at the airport may have witnessed everyone meeting and conspire to kill her off in a convoluted fashion (basically one of them hits on her flatmate and dates her for a while, takes her out to a nightclub, then someone else fakes a phone call to her while the guy steals her keys, gives them to someone else, who gives them to Klaus Kinski, who then goes to her house and kills her - simple!). Of course, once this girl is dead, her flatmate can then identify the guy who stole her keys, so then she and he needs to die too, but then what about the guy who pushes the other guy into the path of a car driven by Kinski?
While the hitmen are scrambling about trying to kill everyone in existence the guy trying to save these poor folks is Philippe Leroy, a cop who is wondering why every time he gets a witness under his protection, they end up dead anyway (note to Philipe - watch more Italian crime films - you'll figure it out soon enough!).
The plot might be the same as usual but Mario Gariazzo is a trashy enough actor to know that to keep the audience awake you've got to have the car chases, boobs, violence and Luciano Rossi getting his balls burned off with welding gear. Why does Luciano always get cast as a rapist? Was he comfortable with this?
