martinwilliamrandall — 11 years ago(November 18, 2014 08:01 AM)

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
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 citys 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 Harrys loose approach to finesse of police work and the genuine vigilantism of his foes. Its message about internal corruption rather than outward criminality that also echoes the recent tribulation of Nixons 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 Callahans 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 tran