Review by Dan Taylor
I'm a firm believer that most films don't need to be longer than 90 minutes. Quite frankly, if you can't tell me a story and wrap it up in that amount of time, I'm not sure I need to see it. Hence my current aversion to seeing Jackson's KING KONG... do I really need him to eat up three hours of my life telling me a story I already know? Pfff...
Oddly enough, some exceptions to the rule do come along and MARC THE NARC is one of those exceptions. Clocking in at almost exactly 90 minutes I couldn't help but feel like there was something missing from the tale of Inspector Marc Terzi (Franco Gasparri) and his attempts to nail one-named businessman Benzi (Lee J Cobb) as the head of the Milan drug trade.
Cut from similar, though spaghetti-stained, cloth as Dirty Harry, Terzi is the typical mid-70s anti-establishment, take-no-prisoners cop seen in plenty of flicks of the era. He eschews suits and ties for tight jeans and open collars. He packs a big weapon and carries a formidable gun, too. Chicks are there to save (sorta), bang and make dinner, and not necessarily in that order.
Leisurely plotted and paced, MARC THE NARC has a few fun set pieces that actually solved the mystery of why the film seemed so familiar to me. There's a rather lengthy trailer for it under the title BLOOD, SWEAT AND FEAR that turns up on one of Rick Sullivan's GORE GAZETTE DEPRAVITIES tapes from the 1980s and it includes the confrontation outside a bank in which Terzi stares down the getaway car and coolly stands by as the careening, flipping car slides by him. In another price of admission-lite sequence, Terzi hops out of the passenger seat of his car and runs down – and catches – an ambulance he suspects is being used to smuggle drugs.
For all its positive aspects, though, NARC has its downsides too. Some roles – like that of his boss – seem woefully miscast (what, was Charles Nelson Reilly busy?) and at times Terzi acts like he either has ADD or a complete lack of peripheral vision. Criminals escape, people sneak up on him, fat American character actors run away, etc. In fact, when it's mentioned that Terzi is close to breaking the Benzi case I wondered what evidence they were keeping from me!
As a Dirty Harry fan it was sorta fun watching the tried and true cliches of that series exported to the other side of the Atlantic. Terzi's relationships with women are *beyond* casual and he has a sour world view ("Life is pretty shitty" he tells a junkie chick he's helping kick the habit), plus it's fun guessing which of his cop buddies will be the film's sacrificial lamb. There's even a scene lifted from MAGNUM FORCE where a motorcycle cop carries out an assassination and the pre-requisite shooting range sequence.
Stunningly anti-climactic ending aside I'd watch the next film in the series, which also stars Cobb as Benzi.
