DIRTY HARRY REVIEWS

THE BEST DIRTY HARRY MOVIE REVIEWS EVER! DO YOU FEEL LUCKY *beep*

DIRTY HARRY
10/10 – HARRY KNOWS BEST
9/10 – EXCELLENT
8/10 – BRILLIANT
7/10 – VERY GOOD
6/10 – GOOD
5/10 – AVERAGE
4/10 – WATCHABLE
3/10 – POOR
2/10 – SLOW
1/10 – AWFUL
0/10 – UNWATCHABLE[/b]

DIRTY HARRY – 10/10
Eastwood doesn't care; he says to hell with the Bill of Rights and stalks out of the district attorney's office. But when Scorpio hijacks the school bus, it is Eastwood again, who is asked to be bag man and carry the ransom. This time he refuses. He wants Scorpio on his own. We've already seen him twisting Scorpio's broken arm ("I have a right to a lawyer!" Scorpio shouts), and soon we will see him kill Scorpio in cold blood. Then, in a thoughtful final scene, Eastwood takes his police badge and throws it into a gravel pit.It is possible to see the movie as just another extension of Eastwood's basic screen character: He is always the quiet one with the painfully bottled-up capacity for violence, the savage forced to follow the rules of society. This time, by breaking loose, he did what he was always about to do in his earlier films. If that is all, then "Dirty Harry" is a very good example of the cops-and-killers genre, and Siegel proves once again that he understands the Eastwood mystique.But wait a minute. The movie clearly and unmistakably gives us a character who understands the Bill of Rights, understands his legal responsibility as a police officer, and nevertheless takes retribution into his own hands. Sure, Scorpio is portrayed as the most vicious, perverted, warped monster we can imagine -- but that's part of the same stacked deck. The movie's moral position is fascist. No doubt about it.I think films are more often a mirror of society than an agent of change, and that when we blame the movies for the evils around us we are getting things backward. "Dirty Harry" is very effective at the level of a thriller. At another level, it uses the most potent star presence in American movies -- Clint Eastwood -- to lay things on the line. If there aren't mentalities like Dirty Harry's at loose in the land, then the movie is irrelevant. If there are, we should not blame the bearer of the bad news.

MAGNUM FORCE – 5/10
PlotIdiosyncratic but effective San Francisco cop Dirty Harry Callahan is on the trail of a vigilante group that is taking out the city’s undesirables. When he discovers there might actually be cops responsible, Harry has to go on the bounds of his own orders to bring them down. ReviewA satisfying sequel to the immortal Dirty Harry, that still signalled the gradual slide from radical filmmaking into the stodgy maintenance of a franchise with further empty cases for the uncivil and amoral Harry Callahan. This lean thriller really feels the absence of Don Siegel, an expert in framing the excesses of movie violence in a stark, moral climate, but does maintain the gutsy ‘70s temper of its progenitor. Perma-sneered Eastwood glowers and growls as if the effort to spit out his lines is too much, and there is the basics of a moral dilemma in the comparison of Harry’s loose approach to finesse of police work and the genuine vigilantism of his foes. It’s message about internal corruption rather than outward criminality that also echoes the recent tribulation of Nixon’s foiled administration. When you realise that John Milius and Michael Cimino wrote the script, two arch-fretters at the borders of the establishment, things become a little clearer. Yet when it is boiled down to some kind of neat essence, the dependence on the standard fabric of commercial policiers — shoot-outs, chase scenes, glib one-liners — tempers such aspirations to the meaningful. It plays to the feeble in the watcher where you just want to see the toughest sonofabitch on the ‘Frisco force bring down the evil within, ironically represented by TV stalwarts David Soul and Robert Ulrich. Hal Holbrook — who had recently played Deep Throat — makes the usual moves as Callahan’s boss but with some conviction. Thus, as hard as the screenwriters try, the film never makes a telling point beyond just another classic Harry-ism: "Nothing wrong with shooting, as long as the right people get shot." VerdictVery 70's, very early Eastwood. This has grit coming out of its ears but not the greatest Eastwood feature by a long shot.

THE ENFORCER – 3/10
LOS ANGELES -- The stick-up men are trapped in a liquor store. The cops have the place surrounded. There are innocent hostages inside. One of them will be killed unless the police supply a getaway car. "Hey, Harry - what are you doing?" asks a cop. "Taking them a car," says Harry Callahan. He commandeers a car. spins it 180 degrees, drives it straight through the plate glass front of the liquor store, runs down one robber, leaps out and opens fire on the others. It's amazing this guy is still on the force. Dirty Harry has been taking the law into his own hands in three films now, gunning down the bad guys on the streets of San Francisco, As punishment, he keeps getting transferred to assignments like traffic and personnel, but by the next film he's back on homicide again.In "Dirty Harry" and "Magnum Force," some disturbing philosophical questions were raised by Harry's behavior: Were these movies glorifying a cop who was self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "The Enforcer," Clint Eastwood's third (and, it's said, his last) film as Dirty Harry, gets off the hook by handling its killings more in terms of self defense and rescue operations, instead of as cold-blooded executions.It's also a more light-hearted film (although that may be hard to guess on the basis of the opening liquor store scene). All Dirty Harry films have given us a hard-boiled combination of violence and humor, with most of the laughs coming out of Harry's laconic calm in the face of mayhem. This time, though, there's, a genuinely interesting plot development that inspires a good deal more humor: Dirty Harry, of all people, has just been given a woman as his partner. Harry places women in two categories, those to be used and those to be rescued. He has never imagined one as a partner. And especially not this one. He meets her the first time when she's taking her oral examination, (Harry, it should be explained, has been demoted to personnel again and assigned to the promotion board.) She has been on the force 10 years, he discovers. As a clerk. Now she's going to get promoted, go out onto the street, do real police work, get a larger salary than a lot of the guys who've been on the force longer and deserve it more - because she's a woman and there are quotas to be met. Harry's livid. He gives the woman a hard time during the examination. Asks her rude, personal questions. Grinds his teeth. Rails against this whole business of sending a woman to do a man's job. And then, inevitably, it turns out she's assigned to be his partner, How he got back to homicide so quickly is, thankfully, glossed over; it would take an hour in each of these movies to explain why he's not in jail. The woman is played by Tyne Daly, who has done a lot of stage work but never made a name in the movies. She's very well cast, She's not beautiful, but she has a direct, spontaneous attractiveness. She speaks up for herself, has intelligent observations to make, is willing to learn from Harry's experience, and doesn't do dumb female things, except once when she can't find her gun in her purse. (When I say "dumb female things," you understand, I am reflecting Harry's chauvinistic attitude toward these matters.) Eventually she saves Harry's life. "A guy could have a worse partner," he admits."The Enforcer" is the best of the Dirty Harry movies at striking a balance between the action and the humor. Sometimes in the previous films we felt uneasy laughing in between the bloodshed, but this time the movie's more thoughtfully constructed and paced. For the first time we really get a sense of the human being behind Harry's facade, some of the scenes with Tyne Daly wouldn't work any other way. And Clint Eastwood, as always, is good at projecting Harry's loyalties and convictions in the fewest words possible.
The plot is cheerfully confusing, having to do with something called the Ecumenical Liberation Army, which may or may not be on the level. At various points explosives are employed and the mayor is kidnapped, and there's a sensational shoot-out at Alcatraz during which Eastwood, who seems to enjoy a larger weapon in every movie, uses a hand held bazooka, But the best things in the movie are the scenes between Eastwood and Tyne Daly. A relationship is explored, and it leads somewhere and makes a statement, and that makes "The Enforcer" more satisfactory than Dirty Harry's previous adventures - unless, of course, you go to see the bazooka.

SUDDEN IMPACT – 7/10
Most of what you hear about pop art and pop culture is pure hype. But there comes a moment about halfway through "Sudden Impact," the new Dirty Harry movie, when you realize that Harry has achieved some kind of legitimate pop status, as the purest distillation in the movies of the spirit of vengeance. To all those cowboy movies we saw in our youth, all those TV Westerns and cop dramas and war movies, Dirty Harry has brought a great simplification: A big man, a big gun, a bad guy and instant justice.We learned early to cheer when John Wayne shot the bad guys. We cheered when the Cavalry turned up, or the Yanks, or the SWAT Team. What Eastwood's Dirty Harry movies do is very simple. They reduce the screen time between those cheers to the absolute minimum. "Sudden Impact" is a Dirty Harry movie with only the good parts left in. All the slow stuff, such as character, motivation, atmosphere and plot, has been pared to exactly the minimum necessary to hold together the violence. This movie has been edited with the economy of a 30-second commercial. As a result, it's a great audience picture. It's not plausible, it doesn't make much sense, it has a cardboard villain and, for that matter, a hero who exists more as a set of functions (grin, fight, chase, kill) than as a human being. But none of those are valid objections. "Sudden Impact" is more like a music video; it consists only of setups and payoffs, its big scenes are self-contained, it's filled with kinetic energy, and it has a short attention span. That last is very important, because if anyone were really keeping track of what Callahan does in this movie, Harry would be removed from the streets after his third or fourth killing. Dirty Harry movies are like Roadrunner cartoons; the moment a body is dead, it is forgotten, and nobody stands around to dispose of the corpses.The movie's basically a revenge tragedy. A young woman (Sondra Locke) and her sister are sexually attacked at a carnival by a group of quasi-human bullies. The sister goes nuts, and Locke vows vengeance. One by one, she tracks down the rapists, and murders them by shooting them in the genitals and forehead. Dirty Harry gets assigned to the case, and the rest is a series of violent confrontations. Occasionally there's comic relief, in the form of Harry's meetings with his superiors, and his grim jawed put-downs of anyone who crosses his path. ("Suck fish heads," he helpfully advises one man.) If the movie has a weakness, it's the plot. Because I'm not sure the plot is relevant to the success of the film, I'm not sure that's a weakness. The whole business of Locke's revenge is so mechanically established and carried out that it's automatic, and because she has a "good" motive for her murders, she doesn't make an interesting villain. If Eastwood could create a villain as single-minded, violent, economically chiseled and unremittingly efficient as Dirty Harry Callahan, then we'd be onto something.

THE DEAD POOL – 4/10
The little twitch comes and goes so fast it’s easy to miss. It’s in the corner of Dirty Harry’s face, and it betrays the seething anger hidden beneath his mask of calm. It’s not even anger, really, that seethes inside there - but indignation, that criminals are going free while the San Francisco Police Department devotes itself to public relations. What’s interesting about the twitch is that it comes at just the right moment, early in the movie, and the audience is waiting for it, and there’s actually a cheer when they see it.Rarely have the mental states of a series movie character become more familiar than those of Dirty Harry’s.“The Dead Pool” is the fifth in the series, and most of the people watching it will have seen the other four. They know of Harry’s impatience with bureaucracy, and his willingness to go it alone, one-on-one, with the criminals in his path. Like the fans of a familiar opera, Dirty Harry fans wait for the key moments.After the twitch, we know that before long there will be two more: the moment when Inspector Harry Callahan is called on the carpet in his superior’s office and given a severe dressing-down, and the moment, not long after, when he is suspended from active duty. Unless my memory fails, Harry has solved all of his cases while on suspension.The balancing act in a good Dirty Harry movie is between the familiar notes, which must remain the same every time, and the new angles in every case. “The Dead Pool,” which is as good as the original “Dirty Harry,” has lots of new angles, and a lot of things to say, especially about horror films, television news and the burden of being a celebrity.The title comes from a macabre gambling game that is being played in San Francisco as the movie opens: A list of eight celebrities has been distributed, and people place bets on which of the eight will be the first to die. The winner takes the pool. And before long, of course, Harry Callahan’s name is on the list.One of the players in the Dead Pool is Peter Swan (Liam Neeson), a monomaniacal British horror-film director, who is making a rock video in San Francisco. One of the names on the list is the drug-addicted rock star who is starring in the video. When the rock star is found dead, the director naturally is a prime suspect. But Harry thinks the plot runs deeper than that, and he is right.In the course of his investigation, he crosses paths with Samantha Walker (Patricia Clarkson), an aggressive TV reporter who is constantly shoving her camera in Harry’s face. One day Harry grabs her camera and throws it as far as he can, but in no time the two of them are having candlelit dinners and discussing the problems of fame - problems that Harry has thought about much more deeply and interestingly than Samantha.As the movie develops, we get point-of-view glimpses that clue us in to the fact that someone is killing the members of the Dead Pool and trying to frame the hapless Peter Swan. These shots arrive at some sort of climax in a brilliant and inspired scene in which Harry’s car is pursued up and down the hills of San Francisco by another car that is filled with powerful plastic explosives. The gimmick is that the other car is a model, only about a foot long, and so the suspense is intermixed with a hilarious parody of the chase scene in “Bullitt.” (It is highly doubtful that such a small car could travel that fast, but what the hell.) The best thing about “The Dead Pool” is the best thing about almost all of Clint Eastwood’s movies: The film is smart, quick, and made with real wit. It’s never just a crude action movie, bludgeoning us with violence. It’s self-aware, it knows who Dirty Harry is and how we react to him, and it has fun with its intelligence. Also, of course, it bludgeons us with violence.