This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Magnum Force (1973)Plot In A Paragraph: Dirty Harry is on the trail of vigilante cops who are not above going beyond the law to kill the city's undesirables.How do you follow up one of the best movies of the 70's?? By making a solid sequel like this is the answer!! Magnum Force is not only a worthy sequel, it's a really good movie in general. Hal Holbrook is an actor I've always liked seeing and David Soul is fine too, but this is Clint's movie and he dominates every scene from start to finish. Magnum Force was Clint's biggest hit at this point as it grossed $39 million at the domestic box office to become the 6th highest grossing movie of 1973.

The ending of the first Dirty Harry (an excellent film) saw Clint Eastwood's Inspector Harry Callahan kill the disgusting and too-evil-to-live Scorpio and in turn, throw his badge away, signifying that he will never come back to the San Francisco police force and go on killing bad guys as a vigilante. Surely this would mean that there won't be any sequels...right? Wrong. Harry is back on the force and continuing his police work despite disobeying the orders of his superiors in Magnum Force, directed by Ted Post (Hang 'Em High, also with Eastwood; Beneath the Planet of the Apes), and sees him (temporarily) re-assigned to Stakeout instead of Homicide. Here, he is investigating the murders of many of the city's most notorious criminals, including narcotics kingpins and pimps (one of whom murders a prostitute with drain cleaner in one of the film's more graphic scenes). During the film, he meets a group of young rookie cops, including a fresh-faced Tim Matheson (Eric Stratton from Animal House (1978)) who admire Harry very deeply (not in a sexual way, mind you). As the film presses on, Harry believes that they are the ones doing the killings, and he is forced to confront his own ideas about violating the rights of the criminals when they are taken to the extreme.What I want to get out of the way is that the major problem I have with this film is that no matter how many Dirty Harry sequels you make, I can't get over the fact that Harry threw away his badge at the end of the first film after killing Scorpio. Did he decide to come back after a short while? And shouldn't his superiors have been more critical of him for disobeying his orders (like firing him or prosecuting him)? Regardless, neither the Scorpio killing nor Harry throwing his badge away is mentioned in the whole film. Another issue is that during the film, Harry develops a casual romance with a young woman named Sunny, who seems to have the hots for him right away. It's cute, I will admit, but like with Harry's romance with Sam in The Dead Pool (1988), it's glossed over quickly.After the problems I highlighted, the rest is pretty damn great. The film keeps up the action and graphic violence of its predecessor, especially during two great scenes in a store robbery stakeout and a shootout with a gang of criminals at a food plant. The score by Lalo Schifrin is also catchy, with the opening theme being the standout. It's pure 70s style tunes. And even though Harry's relationship with Sunny is glossed over, the film also shows Harry's (not romantic) relationship with the wife of his friend, Charlie (Mitchell Ryan from High Plains Drifter and Lethal Weapon), who holds the safe beliefs as Harry, but is a bit more unhinged about the situation, best described when his wife mentioned an occasion when he played Russian Roulette with himself. The scenes between Harry and Charlie's wife feel appropriately calm and gives audiences a chance to see Harry as a human being more than his scenes with Sunny. Hal Holbrook makes a great turn as Lt. Briggs, and Eastwood himself makes Harry a tough, but understandable and human guy the second time around. It's also interesting to see Harry delve into more police work than he did in the first film, especially when he's using Ballistics to match up the bullets found at the murder scenes to the weapon used, and then the killers.Now I want to discuss the best thing about this film: the themes of taking vigilantism too far, and whether following the system is the right decision. The first film was about how maybe democracy needs to be put aside in order for the police to properly catch criminals, and that maybe the criminals are given too much leeway by the law. Part of the reason this film was created was to answer to the negative criticism towards the first film about Harry maybe being "fascist." However, it doesn't just feel like a simple throwaway piece that the film just inserts. It feels like the film really wants you to think about how it would be to live in a society with squads of killer cops and whether their current democratic system is really a good system to live under.Harry says at one point that he hates the system but will stick with it until something better comes along because he has no choice. We can all get the sense that there are quite a few people in real-life living in this country that hate the system as well, but unless they want to go something so extreme they'll get jailed or worse, they don't have a choice either. When it comes to vigilantism, the film looks at and then makes you think further about how far it could go before it goes too far. Harry discusses how it would be excessive to kill somebody because their dog takes a dump on their neighbor's lawn.Even that's not the worst of it; there's also the possibility of someone killing somebody simply because that person doesn't like the way the other looks at him. Even the killer cops fit so well into the message: more people today are nervous of cops because of police brutality; how safe would they feel if there was a whole squad of them just going out and shooting bad guys dead, point blank? In short, watch this sequel. Like the first film, it does its utmost to make you think about our legal system and whether criminals should be given much leeway by it. It's action-packed to the max and it is a solid sequel that can be a great companion piece to the original Dirty Harry. "It's all in a day's work for Inspector Harry Callahan."

This sequel to the popular DIRTY HARRY sees Clint Eastwood reprising the role (he would return another three times) of the tough cop "Dirty" Harry Callahan, this time tackling a vigilante bunch of young police officers who decide to rid their city of human waste - namely known criminals who have been set free by the courts. Of course their methods get out of hand, leading to the brutal murder of a policeman and the subsequent hunting by Callahan of the criminals. This is above-average stuff for the genre, full of great action sequences, lots of hard violence, and interesting characters. Clint Eastwood once again makes Callahan his own, an impeccably icy cool cop who's quick with the witty one-liner and who will always get his man.The DIRTY HARRY series in particular seems to be the main one to have influence the Italian "polizia" films of the '70s, and this follows a template very much like those - murders and incidents of crime are followed by investigation and a final battle between the good guys and police. And what a battle it is here. From excellent shoot-outs to speedy car chases, MAGNUM FORCE culminates in a fantastic chase sequence in which Harry goes one on three with the corrupt policemen out to kill him, in a well-realised and very violent car chase-cum-shootout episode which just keeps getting better and better, filled with cool stunts and on-the-edge situations.As well as Eastwood, there's a strong supporting cast including Hal Holbrook, excellent as Briggs, a rival with a deadly secret to hide from Harry. Look out for the familiar faces playing the vigilante squad before they were famous: David Soul, Tim Matheson, Kip Niven, and Robert Urich. Felton Perry seems to have been added on in an exploitative note as Harry's black sidekick, and one sequence involving his character is one of the most harrowing in the film. Of course there's also a string of cold-blooded murders for viewers to beware of, including the violent murder of a prostitute by her pimp and his subsequent shooting. MAGNUM FORCE, as the title might suggest, is a film in which guns and firearms figure predominantly - a real macho exercise in crime and the methods used to stop it. A classic in the crime genre which helped to shape the films that followed.

The second "Dirty Harry" film, directed by Ted Post (a friend of star Clint Eastwood's from their days in television), is full of smash-ups, crash-ups, a pimp killing a prostitute with drain cleaner down her throat, a metal girder catching a crime czar right in the face, and a police inspector (Eastwood's partner) dispatched in a shameful manner--by opening a bobby-trapped mailbox! The plot is inverted from 1971's "Dirty Harry"--this time, the kids are all right and the cops are the bad guys. No matter; Eastwood's Harry Callahan dispatches with the legalities and mows down the crooked rookies just as he did with the hippie sniper from the predecessor. The screenwriters (John Milius and Michael Cimino!) don't even attempt to recognize the irony inherent in the scenario--it's just a plot gimmick to them, another way to go with this character. Still, for fans of completely mindless action fare, one could do worse than "Magnum Force". It has built-in audience approval, which is impossible to shake; one goes into the movie knowing exactly what to expect--and enjoying that all expectations are fully met. Post keeps it moving--thumping, thumping--like an erotic dance for would-be assassins. ** from ****