Two professional hit men from the States are hired to track down a small-time pimp Luca Canali in Milan, as this man was accused of the disappearance of a shipment of heroin between Milan and New York. Well that's what they are to believe by local crime boss Don Tressoldi. Their job is to brutally kill Luca and make a message of it. However Luca doesn't know why they want him and he won't go down too easy, as he tries to get to the bottom of it.

This confidently gritty 70s Italian crime thriller might start off slowly, but when it hits its strides. Boy it doesn't let up. What starts off talky where you are waiting for things to happen gets better as it moves along, where plot threads unfold and it suddenly becomes impulsively hazardous. There's one sensational car / foot chase sequence that packs brute force and never gives you a chance to catch a breath. It's very well done. Most of the action follows the same dynamic pattern. Thrilling, tough and intense with constant roughness. Fist fighting, scuffles and shootouts… as the sweat pours and the bruises are inflicted. Hear and see it! Not escaping is the seedy hook, brassily loud instrumental score, compact camera-work and authentic European locations.

Some well known players feature in the cast. Woody Strode and Henry Silva are the American assassins. Strode plays the quiet, steady head and Silva's a live-wire, womanizer. Complete opposites, but the same rather deadly and downright bad-asses. This shows in the lethal cat and mouse climax in a car scrap-yard with Mario Adorf's character. Adorf holds his own with a respectable turn, constantly making a slip when the manhunt begins, but after a tragedy hits. Now he's fuelled by revenge… going in head first. The script is just as jagged, as like the editing but there's a sardonic edge to it and the excessive melodramatics ups the emotions and motivations.

Hard-boiled, if bittersweet Italian crime entertainment.

A pumping soundtrack. An appealing cast. A profanity-strewn script. A pace that never lets up. Oodles of hard-knuckle thrills and incredibly sadistic action. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, what we have in our hands is MANHUNT IN MILAN, another top-notch Italian crime thriller which plays like a pasta version of CHARLEY VARRICK. MANHUNT IN MILAN is proof of the fact that the Italians are in their element when staging elaborate high-speed car chases through beautiful sun-bleached city locations or fast shoot-outs where, if you blink, you'll no doubt miss a death or two. This is a great viewing experience that easily rivals the work of Umberto Lenzi and Maurizio Merli in their later great collaborations in the genre.

This sleazy film takes time in introducing the leading anti-hero character of Luca Canali, a good-natured pimp who nevertheless likes to hang out at dodgy clubs and surround himself with naked Italian women. Canali is played to perfection by Mario Adorf as a greasy, loud-fashioned yet kind and initially gentle man who is pushed to the edge as he finds himself pursued across his home city by a series of increasingly violent hit men, who work for big-name gangster Don Vito, played by one-time Bond villain and genre regular Adolfo Celi who excels at this kind of thing and pulls the part off perfectly. The stakes are raised when Adorf's ex-wife and child are brutally murdered by the Mafia and he arms himself to take revenge.

The various thrills are handled spectacularly by director Fernando Di Leo (an action specialist who also gave the world CALIBRE 9 - also with Adorf). The pacing is slow to start off with but gradually builds up into breakneck speed, culminating in a huge city-wide chase sequence at around the hour mark which is truly amazing stuff. Stuntmen risk their lives, vehicles are totalled in milliseconds, and you'll be swept away by the rhythmic music that perfectly accompanies the action and makes the whole thing madly exciting. Definitely one of the best chases I've seen in the movie and, trust me, I've seen a lot. The finale, in which Adorf faces off against the two hit men in a junkyard, is highly suspenseful and ends with a fine imaginative payoff for the villains.

When it comes to the violence, Di Leo doesn't hold back, with women being savagely beaten, point-blank gunshots to the head, and all manner of beatings and stabbings along the way. The main reason the film works, however, is that it never loses touch with characterisation, instead fleshing out Silva and Strode from being one-dimensional villains into understandable, even somewhat likable real people. Along with Adorf and Celi, Silva and Strode (great-sounding pair, that) put in excellent portrayals of ruthless hit men. Silva is fine as the smarmy womanising partner whilst Strode is at his best playing it tough and silent. The supporting cast are also fine with lots of familiar faces in minor parts, these include Luciana Paluzzi as the fragile female lead and PUZZLE's Bruno Corazzari playing yet another sleazy low-life. The cast, the pacing, the surprising depth and the action combine to make MANHUNT IN MILAN one of the Italian gangster flicks to beat and a highlight of the Italian film industry. See it!

Wow, the accolades paid to this film by the reviewers on this board make me wonder if any of them had seen "The Godfather". That film came out the same year and by comparison, there is no comparison. But for what it is, "Manhunt", the title I saw this under, is a perfectly low brow take on Italian gangsters ruffled by a pair of American hit-men sent to make good on a six million dollar stash of missing heroin. I'm not familiar with director Fernando di Leo or his acclaimed trilogy, but this is passable enough if you've got the time to spare. Effective as the framed pimp Luca Canali, Mario Adorf delivers a believably crazed performance when up close and personal with fellow thugs who get in his face. Particularly effective is his head-butting style, which at one point takes out a menacing telephone that happened to get in the way. If you like your Italian crime films sprinkled with some skin, this one delivers on that score as well, with gratuitous amounts of go-go strippers who appear to be above the pay grade for this flick, so that's just an unexpected benefit. What made it for me was the well cast duo from the States, Henry Silva and Woody Strode in a two decade early preview of Travolta and Jackson in "Pulp Fiction". If you made it this far, stick around for the junkyard scene with the swinging steel jaws as the gangsters shoot it out with THE gangster. It's not pretty, but it is cool. Very cool.