THE DEAD POOL is the fifth, last, and worst of the DIRTY HARRY series. It’s still watchable because it’s Dirty Fuckin Harry, but it completes the pattern of each entry being not as good as the last.

It’s important to consider the time of the release though. In the US it came out 20 years from last month. July 13th, 1988. It was a Wednesday. Harrison Ford was out celebrating his 46th birthday. One of the girls from the “High School Musical”s was being born. Long haired kids in Minneapolis were trying to find someone to buy them beer at a convenience store near the Metrodome where the Monsters of Rock Tour would be playing that night. Red Sox fans were trying to figure out what to make of John McNamara being replaced by Joe Morgan. Ronald Reagan was signing Executive Order 12646, establishing an emergency board to investigate a dispute between the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation and certain of its employees represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. And there was a new fuckin Dirty Harry movie coming out!

If you’re too young to remember it or if you had substance abuse problems at the time and also don’t remember it let’s try to picture it: it’s the middle of summer. You like action movies. RAMBO III has been out since May, but it wasn’t very good. You don’t give two shits about CROCODILE DUNDEE II. This summer needs a really good action movie. I mean, THE PRESIDIO? Not that exciting. RED HEAT? Okay I guess. ROGER RABBIT was cute but… I don’t know. So you’re excited to go out and see that new DIRTY HARRY movie! You should be able to get out of work on time to get to the theater. Hopefully it won’t be sold out yet. Yeah, man, DIRTY FUCKIN HARRY! THE DEAD POOL! You’re fuckin THERE. Even if it’s not that good it’s gonna be the best thing out there. What else is coming out? The only other action movie is on Friday there’s that one about the skyscraper, with the guy from MOONLIGHTING. Pretty laughable.

(I’m not making that up, the DIRTY HARRY series really ended two days before the DIE HARD series started.) (more…)

Here’s a movie not directed by Clint Eastwood (it’s Wolfgang Peterson, the DAS BOOT guy) but like alot of his directorial works of the past 20 years it deals with him getting old. Clint plays a Secret Service agent named Frank Horrigan. He’s still working but he’s washed up – he was there when JFK got shot and is still haunted by his failure. After that he became a huge asshole, he started drinking and his wife and daughter left. But this is Clint we’re talking about so we still like him, and also he plays jazz piano.

This is a good example of those ’90s big budget studio action thrillers along the lines of EXECUTIVE DECISION and DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, movies that depict the workings of a city and its various departments as they respond to an emergency. In this case it’s the Secret Service responding to a threat against the president. We see Clint and his new partner (Dylan McDermott, or possibly Dermot Mulrooney – I don’t know which is which so if it’s important to you check IMDb) making their rounds, so first they have to shoot some guys over counterfeit money, then they have to check out a report of “some weirdo.” It just so happens that this is the one in a thousand of those calls that really is a dude planning to kill the president. He’s not home but he sees Clint in his apartment from afar and the game begins.

If you can rent this without knowing who plays the villain then you should go ahead and do that right now. I’ll wait. But most of you already know that the villain is played by former WWF superstar Jake “The Snake” Roberts in a career-defining role. Actually that’s not true, that was a spoiler buffer, it’s actually John Malkovich. He’s a challenge for Clint because he’s real devious and smart. He hand makes his own metal-free zip gun and sets up a false identity to get into campaign rallies. He’s a master of disguise. He finds a way to scramble his phone line so he can call Clint untraced and taunt him about things he read about him in magazines, or to pretend like he thinks they’re buddies. (more…)

In the third Dirty Harry picture Inspector Callahan has become some sort of an enforcer, a guy who travels around enforcing things. Alot of people tend to dismiss the series after MAGNUM FORCE, and it’s true that this one isn’t as good as the two before it, but I gotta admit I like it.

Alot of the goofiest shit from ’70s and ’80s cop movies, the cliches that get made fun of all the time, might be traced directly to this movie. This is definitely a prime example of the cartoonishly out of line bureaucrats in the police headquarters who demand the police “clean up the streets” but get mad at them when they do. “I didn’t say to use violence.” It’s got the scene where he gets suspended and has to give back his badge, which is memorable because Harry calls it a “seven point suppository… you heard me, stick it up your ass!” And the opening section of the movie is about him driving around encountering different police situations unrelated to the plot just so they can show the funny/abrasive way he deals with criminals, like the guy supposedly having a heart attack in a restaurant who he kicks and tells to get up or the liquor store hostage-takers who demand a car, so he “gives it to them” by driving through the front of the liquor store. (Of course followed by a scene where the aforementioned bureaucrat yells at him with a tally of all the damage done.)

At first it looks like the politics of the series are gonna swing back hard to the right after the unexpected “you know what, maybe it’s not okay for cops to just execute criminals” questioning of MAGNUM FORCE. The villains are the People’s Revolutionary Strike Force, who seem to be some kind of SLA or Weather Underground type leftist extremist group led by a disgruntled Vietnam vet. The bureaucrats tell Harry that “the minority community” won’t stand for police brutality and we’re obviously supposed to consider that an unreasonable demand. And when the police force wants to start promoting women Harry gives voice to all the chauvinist concerns about how they might get their partner killed because they don’t know how to handle themselves. His opposition is an uptight middle aged scold of a feminist with hair and glasses like a librarian. (more…)