Fighting Back

'We gotta go out and scare some respect into these punks.' It's urban vigilante time again, though here more of a clean-streets variant on the current craze for survivalism. Skerritt plays an Italian-American deli owner who organises his People's Neighbourhood Patrol along textbook paramilitary lines, and mounts a violent campaign to stomp all 'deviants' and restore the local park to his kids. There's political conscience somewhere in the script which places its hero as a blood-lust racist and an opportunist politico, but it's all too easily drowned by the crowd-pleaser set pieces of 'righteous' revenge.