“YOU’RE all right for a poofter,” vigilante cop Jason Statham tells his gay colleague during one of Blitz’s more pastoral moments. Marinated in testosterone and composed in fluent Sweeney-speak, nobody is going to mistake Elliot Lester’s deliriously un-PC crime flick for a “pillow-biter” to use the vernacular of its hero.

Irish novelist Ken Bruen created Brant, the hoodie-thumping, evidence-tampering, trigger-happy London copper, in 1998.

Brant proudly batters four wannabe joyriders with a hurley in the opening scene. “It’s like a cross between sport and murder,” explains the assailant helpfully.

Watching the character storm about you'd swear the unconventional detective sergeant was prophetically designed for this Jason Statham meta-movie. Though less pointedly arch than something like Jean Claude Van Damme's JCVD, there's an anarchic, outrageous Vizsensibility about Blitz.

Brant, a cartoonish cross between the last Statham geezer-fu hero and a Rottweiler, exists to snort angrily, pummel angrily and shout angrily. Nobody slaps him with sexism charges when he says: “Microwave? That’s woman’s work.” Nobody questions his unorthodox uses for sports equipment. Nobody quibbles with methods that place him to the right of Genghis Khan. “It gets the job done,” is a refrain.

Statham’s Brant blends seamlessly into a heightened movieverse where all the tabloid headlines seem to be penned by one dodgy hack (David Morrissey) and where Irish actor Aidan Gillen, as a serial cop killer, puts in a cackling, suitably ostentatious turn.

Alarmed by headlines about one of their officer’s disregard for rules of engagement, top brass opt to call in the resident psychopath to hunt the murderer down. Brant’s investigation buddy is tough, gay DC Porter Nash (Considine) from posh west London. Soon enough, the duo is happily tearing through side streets and cardboard boxes. Bromance does not blossom.

Fast paced, mostly funny on purpose and jollied along by ironic, post- Grand Theft Autoviolence, Blitz doesn't have the gloss of Crankor the Transporterfilms but it does have an entertaining quotient of swearing and fighting.