Starring: Alicja Bachleda-Curuś, Joanna Kulig, Maja Ostaszewska, Magdalena Cielecka
Directed by: Patryk Vega
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Unlike the reboot of Ghostbusters in the United States, the third episode of the Pitbull saga has not generated any gender divide over the film’s domestic reception in Poland. After all, the gender swap in the screenplay of Pitbull Niebezpieczne kobiety (Pitbull – Tough Women) is just a partial twist. “In 2015 40% of the new joiners in the Polish police were women”, reads a tag line from Vega’s sequel to Pitbull New Order. Perhaps it’s also a sign of faith that Vega wrote during his studies a sociology dissertation around the theories of the feminist thinker Alain Touraine before he would embrace filmmaking.
Nonetheless, his latest effort is highly densely packed with male characters including some comebacks from the series such as the mohawked cop Dariusz “Majami” (Piotr Stramowski) and the even more muscled Vin-Diesel-esque potato-headed henchman Marcin “Strachu” (Tomasz Oświeciński). Moreover, the plot is driven by the implausible puppet master Remek (Sebastian Fabijański), a tenebrous motorcycle gangster, brave fireman and merciless mafioso, all in one role. This doesn’t mean that the female characters portraying criminals and law enforcers are flat but eventually Vega seems to have oscillated between a cinematic statement of gender egalitarianism towards violence and a gruesome misogyny, as exemplified in the shoot’em up-like opening sequence where the bodies of several lady bandits fall like leaves in their hideout.
The subject of the so-called “afera paliwowa” scandal from 2007, a VAT fraud based on illegal oil trade, is no more than a superficial sketch in the screenplay, The latest Pitbull is a fast-paced cinematic assortment of small vendettas embellished with aerial shots from a hyper-violent version of Warsaw. Vega’s film also enticed the moviegoers from the Polish diaspora in the United Kingdom and Ireland where the movie was successfully distributed in selected theaters by Odeon.
Review published by Kino Mania on June 15, 2021