Confessions of a Police Captain (1971), Executioner 2 (1984)

The theme for this grindhouse double-feature: ‘When the systems corrupt, you’ve got to take justice into your own hands’, or at least that’s the philosophy of about half the male protagonists in the two films. In Confessions of a Police Captain Martin Balsam is the titular Sicilian Police Captain, and Franco Nero the city’s new district attorney, their both after mafioso developer Luciano Catenacci , only they have conflicting philosophies on the appropriate way to bring him down. Nero is all about a by-the-book, higher moral road justice, he would like to see Luciano and his cohorts convicted fairly through the justice system. While Balsam has come through experience not to trust that system to do its job, he’s seen to much injustice done in the guise of fair justice, and is thusly not a letter-of-the-law advocate when it comes to attempting to achieve justice. And could I use the word ‘justice’ any more in this paragraph.

I enjoyed Balsam and Nero’s dynamic in this movie, its one that changes over the course of the story as layers develop in their relationship and they each attempt to determine their ethical read of the other. They both have the same goal in a general sense (getting Luciano, justice ) but a very different sense of what that means. They do however influence each other over the course of the film, developing a bond of mutual respect, but it is achieved only after they each go through a period of intensely distrusting the other. In the end it is Balsam’s cynical world view that the film implies is the more grounded and accurate one, though Nero’s tempering of it is offered (almost grudgingly) as the more workable option.

While Confessions of a Police Captain is a legitimately good movie (recast and Americanize it with bigger stars and I think you’d have a certified hit on your hands), Executioner 2 is very much not so, rather it is in fact a very bad movie. Presumably there was an Executioner 1, but what if any relationship it has to this film I could only guess, there is really no attempt to tie it into a pre-existing story. Nobody in this low budget film is capable of acting, I’d much rather watch Mitchell, or even Walk the Angry Beach, which at least aims for some dramatic pretense. Any attempt at forming a dramatic chore or character motivation in this film is strictly an act of going through the motions, the angry Vietnam vet vigilante (dubbed by the media ‘The Executioner’) feels that the war has not ended, “not as long as there is crime in the streets”, what this sentiment has to do with the actual Vietnam War is as mysterious as what the first Executioner movie has to do with this one. This has got to be one of the five or ten worst movies I’ve ever seen. Was that oddly accented news reporter suppose to be a riff on Barbara Walters? Police Lieutenant Roger O'Malley is played by Robert Mitchum’s son Christopher