San Francisco detective Harry Callahan is on the case when various associates of horror film director Peter Swan end up dead. Callahan is befriended by a news reporter, and the two attempt to uncover if Swan is behind the killings.
The fifth and final of the Dirty Harry movies is an enjoyable if a little predictable cop thriller, but not as good as the seventies films. I like Harry; he's your standard lovable right-wing maniac, whose idea of justice is to shoot anyone he doesn't like in the head. He's ever so slightly anachronistic these days, but he is what he is, take him or leave him. There is some nice characterisation - Clarkson does a good job as the reporter waking up to her industry's shallow cultural contribution, Neeson has fun as the bad-tempered hack filmmaker with a camp accent somewhere between Ballymena and Dick Van Dyke, and Kim is great as Harry's latest hospital-bound partner. As ever with Eastwood's slick Malpaso crew, the film looks terrific and stunt expert Van Horn turns in a nifty chase sequence involving a radio-controlled toy car rigged to explode. The subtext of the film takes some swallowing though - that ghoulish media jackals and gory horror films are to blame for a sick society; very rich in a movie with a non-stop litany of violence and popular anti-authoritarianism. But this is good old-fashioned dirty fun all the same. Watch out for an early role by Carrey as a hopped-up rockstar, and a brief cameo by seminal eighties band Guns'n'Roses.
The fifth and final of the Dirty Harry movies is an enjoyable if a little predictable cop thriller, but not as good as the seventies films. I like Harry; he's your standard lovable right-wing maniac, whose idea of justice is to shoot anyone he doesn't like in the head. He's ever so slightly anachronistic these days, but he is what he is, take him or leave him. There is some nice characterisation - Clarkson does a good job as the reporter waking up to her industry's shallow cultural contribution, Neeson has fun as the bad-tempered hack filmmaker with a camp accent somewhere between Ballymena and Dick Van Dyke, and Kim is great as Harry's latest hospital-bound partner. As ever with Eastwood's slick Malpaso crew, the film looks terrific and stunt expert Van Horn turns in a nifty chase sequence involving a radio-controlled toy car rigged to explode. The subtext of the film takes some swallowing though - that ghoulish media jackals and gory horror films are to blame for a sick society; very rich in a movie with a non-stop litany of violence and popular anti-authoritarianism. But this is good old-fashioned dirty fun all the same. Watch out for an early role by Carrey as a hopped-up rockstar, and a brief cameo by seminal eighties band Guns'n'Roses.