Backstreet Justice

Hired as a troubleshooter for McKees Rocks, a rundown but proud ethnic corner of Pittsburgh, native daughter Keri Finnegan (Linda Kozlowski) keeps running into obstacles set down by sexist neighbors and belligerent cops. Wracked by remorse over her cop father's fall from grace decades earlier, Finnegan tries to flush out a serial killer picking off property owners in her ungentrified neck of the woods. After going undercover as an elderly woman, Keri is attacked by a man in a police uniform. Even after a suspect is arrested for killing his wife, and the police want to close the books on the other unsolved homicides, Keri persists in her private investigation.

Keri is misled by her on-again, off-again lover, Detective Nick Donovan (John Shea); stonewalled by Chief Phil Giarusso (Paul Sorvino), who blames Keri's father for the death of his brother Paddy; and patronized by Nick's father, retired D.A. Donovan (Hector Elizondo). After surviving a bomb planted in her apartment, and emboldened by the death of her landlady, Millie (Viveca Lindfors), Keri begins to unravel a byzantine mystery. Her nosiness angers mobster Rocky Nicoletta, who tries to have her gunned down on a sightseeing boat; Keri's partner, Jessie (Keith Randolph Smith), shields her with his body and is wounded. Though Giarusso is furious that Keri thinks the police may be involved in the serial killings, a visit to her mentally ill mother (Tammy Grimes) nets Keri an old camera containing incriminating photos of the now-defunct crime commission.

Keri's latest theory proposes that Paddy Giarusso, not her dad, was the cop in league with Nicoletta, who's been terrorizing neighborhoods for decades in order to depress property values. In a showdown at Mt. Washington Incline, Keri discovers that Nick and his dad have been Nicoletta's longtime partners. As the bullets fly, D.A. Donovan--who has some conscience--prevents Nick from finishing off the wounded Chief Giarusso and dispatches Nicoletta when the gangster pulls out a pistol. In a coda, Keri's dad is honored with a hero's funeral, and Pittsburgh is finally liberated from a thirty-year reign of real-estate terrorism.

This synopsis only scratches the surface of BACKSTREET JUSTICE's labyrinthine plot. While striking blows for feminism--Kozlowski plays a supercop with cascading Lillian Gish ringlets, and it's a pleasure to see her give as good as she gets from equal-opportunity bruisers--the film departs from reality so thoroughly that it's best described as a crime fantasy, a blend of Hong Kong action pictures with police corruption dramas like PRINCE OF THE CITY or Q&A. The film's serious intentions are undone by details like Kozlowski walking out onto a lofty girder in high heels to confront construction thugs, or the way that Chief Giarusso foams at the mouth every time Keri invades his precinct. The performances are generally overwrought and the climax involves so many bullets flying so many ways, you have to play the scene twice to figure it out. (Graphic violence, extreme profanity, extensive nudity, sexual situations.)