Michael is a drug squad detective, although with the violence, coke snorting and corruption, there is little separating him and his team from the gangsters they take down. When a pair of ruthless Albanian brothers take over the territory of the Greeks who Michael has a kickback arrangement with, he tries to bring them around to a less messy way of doing things, with limited success. With a departmental investigation threatening to put an end to his lucrative operation, enemies coming at him from all directions, and few people he can trust to turn to, it seems his life of moral tightrope walking is finally catching up to him.
Dark and gritty might nowadays be two of the most overused adjectives in film description, but if you can cast your mind back to a time when they were not so ubiquitous as to become effectively meaningless, this is also the time in which Hyena feels like it was made. Like Michael Mann’s 2006 reworking of Miami Vice, despite its modern sheen it still resonates with the 80s.
It’s also comparable in that these men have clearly been doing their jobs for years, and we are given no inkling of the precise path they took to get there; we meet them fully formed as what they have become. Although in Hyena’s case this is the inverse: criminals masquerading as police officers. Assuming they didn’t start out planning to descend in to decadence and corruption, you have to wonder what happened along the way for them to turn into such glorified thugs.
Crime dramas are always at their best when they deal with moral ambivalence, and a more sympathetic side of Michael is developed through aiding Ariana, a former indentured prostitute and now organiser of the Albanians’ drug smuggling operation. Although his compassion for what she is being subjected to might be genuine, considering the brothers’ abusive mistrust in her is effectively brought about by his continual attempts to get information from her, it doesn’t entirely exonerate him. Taylor, the detective heading up the investigation into the corruption of Michael and his team, is the closest thing the film has to an actual good guy, but his oily personality and smarmy exterior prevent us from rooting for him, and by extension exactly who we actually should be.
The film’s ending might frustrate a little, but it’s in no way the first to finish in such a manner, and one other in particular to do so is now a cult classic in the crime genre. The title is presumably a reference to a hyena’s primary survival method, scavenging the carrion (money) acquired from animals (victims) other predators (gangsters) have killed (robbed). Like all parasitic creatures it’s only a matter of time before they’re shaken off, and in the perpetual greyscale morality of Hyena’s underworld, it can be anyone who brings it about.
Overall Verdict: While not offering great innovation, Hyena is nevertheless as bleak and grim as the murky crime sagas it emulates, and is easily worth of standing beside them.
Reviewer: Andrew Marshall