Titles are funny things. Sometimes titles are straightforward; they’ll be the name of a character or the place where all the action takes place – something like Emma or Oklahoma. Other times the title will come from something within the film – The Maltese Falcon or The Hidden Fortress for example. And then there are titles that are a bit more oblique, and you have to understand them from the themes of the film – something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or No Country for Old Men. My favorites are when a character outright states the title of the film or the titles directly state what the film is about.
Buy Young, Violent, DangerousYoung, Violent, Dangerous gives you exactly what the title tells you it does. It could have also been titled Rich, Bored, Assholes. It is part of a genre of Italian crime thrillers now called poliziotteschi that rose up in the late 1960s and became quite popular through the early 1970s. These were dark, gritty, violent films that reflected the rise of real life violence and political turmoil in Italy during the Years of Lead. This film is part of a subgenre of poliziotteschi that focused on affluent young people striking out against society with a wave of crime sprees out of boredom.
Some films within this genre try to find some reasons behind this type of violence. They try to explain why people who seemed to have so much turned to crime. Young, Violent, Dangerous gives us no explanations as to why its three leads – Mario (Stefano Patrizi), Luigi (Max Delys), and Giovanni (Benjamin Lev)—suddenly begin robbing stores, stealing cars, and murdering people. At one point, the police commissario (Thomas Millian) lectures the boys parents about spending too much time earning money and not enough being parents, but the film never really explores that angle. It mostly just follows their criminal exploits.
The film was written by Fernando Di Leo, who scripted some great Spaghetti Westerns and directed a number of memorable poliziotteschi, and you can see a dash or two of political messages in this film, which was Di Leo’s specialty, but most of that seems to have been ditched in favor of one violent escapade after another. There is one scene where, after the boys rob a bank, they take the cash and throw it out the window while they slowly drive around an open air market. But Robin Hood, these boys ain’t.
It begins with Mario’s girlfriend, Lea (Eleonora Giorgi), warning the cops about the trio’s newfound love of crime. She says that Mario’s a good guy, actually, and that they are using toy guns in their crimes. But we, and the Commissario, will soon find out that while the guns may look fake, they shoot real bullets. For his part, Mario doesn’t seem to be really down with murdering people in cold blood, but he’s too afraid of Giovani, the leader, and Luigi, the psychopath, to tell them differently.
As the crimes rack up, so does the violence. Luigi especially seems to get off more and more on shooting people. The film seems to delight in it as well. And it isn’t just gunplay with these boys enjoy. There is one scene where they show up at a friend’s house. He’s found sleeping with two women. Luigi and Giovani decide to take part in the fun, but when the girls balk, they tie them up, ready to rape them. The camera lingers, but the friend hustles them away to rob a grocery store crime (he’ll promptly be shot dead once the robbery is complete).
They’ll eventually kidnap Lea and attempt to flee to Switzerland to escape capture from the increasing police presence. This leads to more violence, more gratuitous nudity, and more car chases. Speaking of gratuitous nudity, Eleonora Girogi’s place in this involves the gang being trapped under a small canopy while a police helicopter circles around. To throw them off, Mario forces Lea to take off her top, and then he pushes her out into the open, where he lies on top of her, grinding and groping, hoping the cops will see them as two lovers out for some fun and go away. It works, but the idea that this couple would run out from under the protection of the canopy and get sexy with a helicopter just meters above them, its blades blowing dust and debris everywhere all around them, is a rather hilarious sight.
Director Romolo Guerrieri handles the action well enough, and since there isn’t a lot more to this film than action sequence after action sequence (with a little bit of periodic exposition thrown in for good measure), I can’t complain too much about how the material was handled. But I must admit I got bored with it after a while. There are only so many cars I can watch being stolen, only so many shootouts I can endure before I need something a little more. And this film offers very little else.
Extras on this new Blu-ray from Raro Video include:
- Original English and Italian audio tracks
- Archival Documentary Ragazzi Fuori
- Audio Commentary by Film Historians and Hosts of Wild, Wild Podcast Adrian Smith and Rod Barnett
- Optional English subtitles for the Italian track
