À couteau tiré

This is a great subtext movie. There's the surface thriller elements and then there's Harvey Keitel's rough-play with John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten. The pair play out the master/slave dynamic with nasty commitment. Its not merely S&M however, its positively psychopathic in a nasty but sickly playful sense. Its a dark little vision of police power abused and quite probably all too real for some viewers and protestors out there who realise the strong arm of the law isn't disembodied from the bodies of individual policeman despite political rhetoric to the contrary. But hey, this isn't all that serious a movie. Keitel is great, Lydon is a vicious victim and it all goes by relatively quickly. John Lydon is worth the price of admission/rental/purchase alone. Enjoyably twisted.