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Based
on real incidents that occurred just a couple
of years before the release of the film, La
Scorta ("The Bodyguards") is
a both a great modern crime movie and a throwback
to the exciting thrillers made in Italy in the
1970s.
In 1992 a Sicilian judge and his police
escort are gunned down. The no-nonsense judge
Michele de Francesco (Carlo
Cecchi) arrives
from the mainland agreeing to act as replacement
and is assigned four rather reluctant young cops
as his bodyguards. The leader of the escorts is
Andrea (Enrico Lo Verso), a family man doing his
best to work his way up the political ladder of
the Italian police. Angelo (Claudio Amendola)
is Andrea's temperamental opposite on the team.
He returned to Sicily because one of the cops
killed guarding the previous judge was a close
friend and he starts asking questions on his own
off duty. The judge turns out to every intention
of following up his predecessor's investigations
and starts making people uncomfortable. At first
the bodyguards are resistant but soon begin to
respect their charge as an honest man and begin
helping him. Gathering information through wiretaps,
informants and finally a turncoat Mafia hit man,
they assemble a case that points to a local businessman.
After the theft of important information from
the judge's police building office the bodyguards
become more involved, doing all the clerical work
as well their regular duties. Francesco's investigation
leads to the highly profitable fresh water supply
operations on the island that seem to spread money
and corruption through every level of local government.
The judge steps in attempting to remove the criminal
influence but only succeeds in causing an artificial
water shortage that is then blamed on him. All
this time escalating threats are being delivered
to the judge; after an attempt is made on his
daughter's life he is moved into a bunker-like
building for protection. The daily menace of possible
car bombs and ambushes might be bad enough but
it becomes increasingly obvious that they're fighting
not only the local Mafia Don but the majority
of the town's politicians as well. It seems that
more people want to maintain the status quo than
you might think.
Tightly directed, well acted and frighteningly
believable in its details, La
Scorta is a fantastic crime movie. Adhering
very closely to real events, the film sports little
in the way of the action most fans of European
crime dramas will expect, but on its own terms
it is extremely exciting. Instead of amping the
violence the filmmakers rely on our knowledge
of the possible dangers and slowly give us more
information about the sinister racket the men
are fighting. The tension levels start low but
slowly inch upwards as we learn more about how
these police escorts do their job. Although they
operate in teams of four, police budget restrictions
only allow two bulletproof vests. So when one
of the cops remarks that even if Italy has no
death penalty the judge's bodyguards are on death
row, he's not joking. Each movement of the judge
can turn into a nerve-rattling drive with something
as seemingly innocent as a parked car causing
tension to rise. One scene involving a faulty
automatic gate had me on the edge of my seat worrying
where the bullets were going to come from. This
is great filmmaking!
The DVD case makes a mention of La
Scorta being an Italian version of The
Untouchables and it's easy to see some
simple parallels between the movies. Both are
about a small group of honest lawmen working within
a corrupt system to take down organized crime.
One scene in La Scorta
centered around a dinner table seems to invite
a comparison of the two films and there are a
few moments when Ennio Morricone's wonderful score
flirts with his own work on the earlier Brian
De Palma movie. But these similarities are merely
on the surface. The Untouchables
was a highly melodramatic fantasy twisting history
to make a great story — this film is brutal in
its realism and often better for it. Nowhere is
its fidelity to reality more in evidence than
in its downbeat, discouraging ending. This is
the way these things happen in the real world
and it's not glorious or heroic. It's just another
way the system wins by holding all the cards.
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