Police 2020 (1997)

Directed by

David Richards

Genre

drama film

Country

United Kingdom

Runtime

1h 35m

Rating

5.5 of 10 from 2 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

In the near future, a police nightshift chief takes on a hostage situation where an armed man blames immigrants for a disease that killed his family. Meanwhile the chief and a colleague compete for a promotion while their bosses manipulate the crisis to test them.

tenseurgentcoldcynicalproceduralfuturisticbleakclaustrophobicsuspenseful

What happens

Police 2020 is a one-off television pilot, first broadcast on 22 June 1997, that was set to be the first episode of an ongoing British crime drama series. Set in the near future, the pilot starred Liam Cunningham as DCI Billy O'Connell, the head of a police nightshift force, who is tasked with tackling an armed suspect, Eddie Longshaw (Keith Barron), who takes a group of Russian immigrants hostage in an elevator after blaming the immigrant population for an outbreak of tuberculosis that took the lives of most of his family. However, whilst conducting his investigation, O'Connell and a close colleague, Marsha Beagley (Rachel Davies), are both in the process of competing for a promotion, and are being monitored throughout the crisis to see who performs better, unaware that their superiors are taking advantage of the situation to pit them against each other. Although the feature-length pilot gained much press attention, a full series was not commissioned. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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