Viewed in
2010
Premise
Clint Eastwood plays Dirty Harry, a cop with his own sense of justice.
Liked
Eastwood being Eastwood.
Hated
Score.
Thoughts
A standard, gritty crime movie with some cool Eastwood moments.
The main reason to check this out is because of Clint in his always cool silent, squint-eyed, "don't mess with me" persona. The famous scene of him taking down a car full of bank robbers and asking one of them if he feels "lucky" was timeless and awesome beyond words. Too bad that happened in the first third of the movie. Another great moment was when he finally went into vigilante mode and stalked the antagonist via bridge.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie was kind of ho hum. I appreciated the gritty style, with bloody bodies and sadistic deeds done onto victims, but I do not think it was anything special. The movie makers made an effort to make a good film and fell short. One cool thing was all the different ways the movie presented to the audience why Eastwood's character name is "Dirty".
I felt sorry for Andy Robinson, who played the bad guy. The actor had to suffer a lot of physical abuse as his character got harassed by Dirty Harry. Yet at the same time, audiences probably hated him because of his hateful, torturing killer character.
Lastly, Lalo Schifrin as composer was a horrible choice. Most of the time, there was minimal score, to enforce the realistic atmosphere of the story. However, when it came to the killer's theme, it sounded like 1970's porn music. Even worse was they leitmotif use of this theme, whenever he's around, queue the porn music. I understand he was an important composer of the time, but the score just totally defeated the seriousness of the moment and annoyed the heck out of me every time.
Watching Clint Eastwood taking the law into his own hands was fun, the rest of the movie was not so much.
What I would change
Used a darker shade of red for all the fake blood. Maybe it was the style back then, but it was way too bright for a movie attempting to portray grit.
Random
I was amused that John Vernon (who would later play Dean Wormer from Animal House) played the mayor.
