Sweeney!

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Year:	1977
Country of origin:	UK
Director:	David Wickes
Genre:	Flying Squad spin-off
Starring:	John Thaw, Dennis Waterman, Diane Keen
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076788/
Tagline:	The roughest, toughest men from London's greatest crime squad smash their way onto the big screen!
Favourite line:	"All right, Tinkerbell. You're nicked!"

Cult British police show classic The Sweeney spawned two spin off movies, the first of which – Sweeney! – by far the better of the pair.

The plot:
A politician, known for an occasional dalliance with ladies of vice, is threatened with ruination when a prostitute he has been 'visiting' is found dead in his hotel suite. Rather than face up to his misdemeanours, he instead chooses to hide his involvement. All seems well, until a friend of the dead woman asks hard smoking, hard drinking, hard punching Detective Regan to investigate and, when he starts asking the right questions to the wrong people, a plan is set in motion to discredit him.
Suspended from The Flying Squad on a drink driving charge that was only partially erroneous – he had been drinking though, to ensure a conviction, he was pulled over by a couple of crooked police sorts, kidnapped and forced to swallow an entire bottle of spirits – Regan must go it alone to uncover the truth, with even his ever faithful partner Carter reluctant to get involved.

Gritty is a word often batted about when The Sweeney is mentioned and, in this case, it is absolutely applicable.
Locations are chosen for their levels of dereliction and the dialogue is stripped to the bone, with barely a sentence passing by without an expletive or three offered, the conversations ribald and profane, though never without good reason. Inevitably, some of the language would be deemed inappropriate in this day and age, specifically in terms of attitudes towards race and women but, some allowance must be made given the context.
I’m not saying it’s OK, I’m just saying it’s understandable given the age of the movie and the type of characters portrayed.
Look, I said it’s not OK.
Heh!
What the hell are you doing? Why are you handcuffing me? Oh Christ, it’s the moral acceptability police come to take me away....and they're wearing Kevlar vests with the word OUTRAGED writ large across their chests.
With lashings of violence, though sporadic, and a crackling atmosphere, this is one TV to movie spin off that managed to make the transition without losing too much credibility.
Good stuff.