SUDDEN IMPACT (1983) - ***1/2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6-Snl4a1RI&feature=related

"Go ahead. Make my Day."

Whatever this is true or not, I don't know, but according to IMDB.com, SUDDEN DEATH supposedly came as a result of a Warner Bros. survey around the time of the last Sean Connery 007 flick NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, asking people to name an actor and a famous part that he/she had played. Despite 7 years since his last adventure, Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" Callahan apparently scored so high, Warner Bros. asked Eastwood if he was interested in returning for a 4th movie. He agreed, but only if he was also both producer and director.

I think the reason behind the eternal popularity of Dirty Harry is that he's a contemporary fantasy throwback to the outlaw law enforcers of the American Wild West in "Wild" Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp, a guy ready and willing to whip out his canon of a gun in the name of justice. Such a guy doesn't exist, nor really last long in our world, which is fitting considering how the real Hickok and Earp were nowhere as outlandish or awesomely cool as their myths state them to be.

What intrigues me with the Dirty Harry franchise, of which few have commented upon, is how that several entries have dealt with that vigilantism. In the original DIRTY HARRY, Callahan throws down his badge to take down once and for all the Scorpio Killer, then MAGNUM FORCE and it's platoon of cops going rogue to "clean the streets," and with SUDDEN IMPACT, it's about a victim trying to enact blood revenge.

The strange thing about SUDDEN IMPACT is that for a Dirty Harry movie, Eastwood is almost a sideline observer, arguably not even involved directly with the plot, and affect the fate of the principles until the finale. Perhaps what really intrigued Eastwood as a filmmaker was to shoot a classy Hitchcock-inspired atmospheric if blunt take on the revenge exploitation genre of action cinema that was quite popular in the 1970s and 80s. If guns have typically been seen as an extension or metaphor for the exertion of masculinity, then with Sondra Locke as an artist who with her sister got gangraped a decade earlier, she goes biblical in her retribution by castrating her perpetrators with a firearm, thus cancelling their manhood. Then with a woman involved with that brood, she gets shot in the breast, thus symbolically taking away her feminity.

Think of all this as like a non-martial arts, down to Earth grounded KILL BILL for the Reagan Decade.

Of course this is still a Dirty Harry movie, and you know what that means. He thwarts a cafe robbery while spouting one of the greatest one-liners in all of American cinema (which was then quoted in a speech by the then-U.S. President), giving the look that yeah today would be Christmas for him if he could just blast away that one last criminal. Though quite honestly, the most awesome badass scene in IMPACT is when he crashes the wedding of a mobster's granddaughter. Harry blackmails him with "confessional" letters written by his dead mistress, which promptly gives the guy a fatal heart attack, and Harry leaves...throwing away the papers revealed to be blank.
Poor girl, imagine that her wedding anniversary for now on will coincide when her gramps kicked the bucket.

The department bureaucrats, forever placing him on suspension or threatening jail time, are here again and they get angry at him defending himself after some henchmen of the dead gangster jump him. Look, I can understand at times their problems with his lack of disregard for civil rights and pragmatism, but in this instance, they're being ridiculous. Still, we get a cool Eastwood's exchange with his superior:

Captain Briggs: "Don't you lecture me, you son of a bitch! Do you know who I am? Do you know my record?"
Harry: "Yeah... you're a legend in your own mind."

Now that's a verbal bitchslap!

Another touch from Eastwood I liked is when he's sent down to the city where Locke is avenging, and he goes into a bar doing his usual policework, there is something shocking in how everyone there just laughs at him. Is Eastwood trying to make a point of how what seems serious in San Francisco seems ludicrous outside city limits, i.e. if people acted like movie cops in reality, or was Eastwood wanting a startling turn of events, twisting upon our expectations of what will happen in a Dirty Harry picture?

Yet I think there is something clunky in how two seperate movies got sewn together, and many moments not feeling like either are a natural progression or a consequence of the other. Then you have this whole sequence where Eastwood is target practicing his new "toy," which was a pointless commercial for the .44 Automag. It's a super cannon pistol, but it just lacks the iconic and powerful lure of his legendary Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum Revolver. Notice that the Automag, unless my memory fails me, didn't return for the last Dirty Harry flick in THE DEAD POOL. I also don't care for the ole stereotypical middle-aged hag lesbian villain, or Locke's sister still catatonic from the sexual assault (sexist?) and Harry getting a sidekick in a farting bulldog that urinates everywhere (though I must admit, I laughed. Sorry).

But there is a crowd-cheering moment in the climax when Eastwood shows up ready to kick some ass, a black shadowry figure representing a hero's tendency for violence, yet surrounded with the white borderline of righteousness. Also, you gotta dig where one of the rapists gets impaled, i.e. he gets penetrated back by Locke. Nice subtlety, Clint.

Still, it's worth noting that the original DIRTY HARRY from the early 70s was all about the legal system being inherently broken by giving the bad guys too many rights, but by SUDDEN IMPACT we learn of a cop who had covered up Locke's rape. I mean, if that act of law enforcement corruption had not taken place, justice would have been served at the courts, and she wouldn't have to go around and giving gory vascectomies. Is it possible that as a character, Dirty Harry had evolved from simplicity that George Wallace had campaigned about, to a more complex interesting archetype?