I used to have this on VHS and always remembered the parts where Payday offed the first cop and the Nasty Boys were getting equipped for their raids, but I could never really recall much else about the movie or the series, since it was well over 30 years ago.
Finally returned to this hidden gem and it's much better than I originally thought. These weren't vigilante cops dispensing of justice Rambo-style; there's even a brief quip in the movie about them not being Rambo.
The title and box art might lead you to believe this is a run-and-gun style, off-the-wall, guns-a-blazin' cop caper, but it's actually not that at all. These guys sort-of do things by the books, and keep their bodycount extremely low, but mostly work outside the traditional boundaries of usual police enforcement.
The premise is that if things go wrong, their head of department gets the blame and they get disbanded, but if things go right, the politicians get all the credit. This is acted surprisingly well, especially by Boy Meets World's William Russ, who plays a no-nonsense Lt., heading up the Nasty Boys.
Despite some of the typical trappings of a late 80s early 90s aesthetic, Nasty Boys holds up surprisingly well. Each of the leads are confident and striking enough to be leads in their own shows, and each manage to capture the audience with their own unique sense of leading-man charisma, not unlike 21 Jump Street.
There isn't much in the way of shootouts or fist fights, but we do get treated to a bit more action meat and potatoes during the third act. As a TV movie it's definitely way above board from what you would typically expect on a channel like CBS, and it's obviously way more violent and gritty than what would be allowed on television today. I think with a slightly bigger budget and a few more gripping action scenes and this could have been a much bigger cult classic. But even still, for what it was and compared to what's available today, this is a pretty cool piece of entertainment well worth watching for those tired of today's trite and ESG-inspired fanfare.
