Dobermann

This is a film disconcertingly at ease with the hyper-charged squalor of its dog-eat-dog criminal netherland. The attraction is obvious - guns'n'goons here mean sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, at high speed and volume - and obviously limited. Either you get off on this cartoon nihilism or you get out. There's an end, a middle, and at least three beginnings to announce the director's intentions: a swaggeringly animated dog pisses over the opening credits; a baptismal benediction ends with the baby united with a gun in his cot; and the now grown Dobermann (Cassel) and moll (Bellucci) get hard and wet playing highway robbers with a rocket launcher. Thereafter, there's an extended sequence in which the Dobermann and his 'kennel' of depraved hard cases pull off a Paris bank heist under the noses of their police watchdogs, followed by another in which an extremely renegade police inspector (Karyo) attempts to trump his nemesis by taking the law and its arsenal into his own brutal hands.