"Magnum Force": review

Dirty Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) faces his nemesis.

[WARNING: spoilers for an old film.]

1973's "Magnum Force" is the second of what would eventually be five Dirty Harry films. It was directed by Ted Post and starred Clint Eastwood as Inspector Harry Callahan, called "dirty" because of his unorthodox, borderline-unethical methods of police work. Post had worked with Eastwood on the movie "Hang 'Em High" and the TV series "Rawhide," so they already had a rapport. The film was scored by cinematic powerhouse Lalo Schifrin, who is probably most famous for the main theme to the TV series "Mission: Impossible"—a theme still heard in the Tom Cruise movies of the past three decades. "Magnum Force" has the distinction of coming out the same year as Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon," and while it's hard to process this, in 1973, the Vietnam War was still going on (1955-1975). The first Dirty Harry movie, creatively titled "Dirty Harry," established the formula for all subsequent Dirty Harry films: there's an A story that gets interrupted by numerous side plots that have little to do with the A story. There's also an antagonist who's often at least a little unhinged, and a partner who ends up getting hurt or killed. "Magnum Force" follows this formula to the letter. It also happens to be the one Dirty Harry film I've never before watched from beginning to end, so I've finally popped that cherry.

In "Magnum Force," someone has gone vigilante and is killing high-profile criminals from pimps to gangster crime bosses who've just been acquitted in court. The movie begins, in fact, with a local mafia boss being gunned down, along with his crew, after being pulled over by someone who seems to be a police officer. Is this, in fact, a police officer, or just someone pretending to be one? Harry Callahan (Eastwood) has been pulled from homicide work and placed on stakeout detail by his irascible boss, Lieutenant Briggs (Hal Holbrook), which keeps Harry on the sidelines. Harry can't help sniffing around, though, and he slowly begins to suspect that the vigilante killings are the work of a group of rookie San Francisco PD officers, many of them ex-military. As Harry unravels the mystery, he sees that the problem goes all the way to the top of the SFPD.

While "Magnum Force" does indeed follow what will become, over five movies, a tried-and-true formula, it also diverges in some ways. For one thing, we see Harry actually smiling while interacting with some children—the kids of one his best friends (Mitchell Ryan, who later played bad-guy General McCallister in "Lethal Weapon") and the friend's ex-wife (Christine White). For another, the antagonists turn out not to be so much insane as extremely partisan ideologues who, unlike Harry, prove to be willing to step over the legal line to fulfill what they see as a sacred duty to the people: to keep the peace no matter the cost.

"Magnum Force" botches several opportunities to develop plot and character. While we find out the vigilantism is affecting the police force all the way to the top echelon, we never see the real connection between the bad guys at the top and the vigilantes on the street. How do money and influence travel up and down that chain of command? What specifics can we learn about this group's ideology? And while Harry's relationship with his partner is developed somewhat, there's a missed chance to turn that partnership into a deeper friendship. The movie is also clever enough to put Harry in the weird position of having to protect criminals from being the next victims of the vigilantes, but the story never leans hard on that angle. When we find out that Harry's suspicions are correct—i.e., that the vigilantes on the street are rookie members of the SFPD—we never see those rookies' characters fleshed out in any meaningful way. The rookies also come off as a bit of a paradox: most of them are combat veterans, so even if they're tyro police officers, they've seen battle and should know how to handle themselves in urban-combat situations. Instead, they often act like raw recruits in the face of Harry's calm, senior expertise, and they make literal rookie mistakes as the film comes to a climax. The ways in which some of the bad guys die are, to put it politely, cringe-inducing.

On the more positive side, we are treated to Clint Eastwood's spookily spectral way of moving slowly, smoothly, and deliberately toward his quarry—a quality he's taken advantage of in pretty much all of the films from his heyday. He has his Angel of Death impression down pat. We also get the dry Eastwood wit as he cracks the occasional joke, plus the flinty Eastwood stare that makes the ladies throw themselves at him. Felton Perry is also solid as Harry's ill-fated partner, Inspector Early Smith, and Hal Holbrook brings a convincingly crusty unpleasantness to his Lieutenant Briggs. "Magnum Force," like all Dirty Harry movies, also features lines of dialogue that serve as a sort of pro-victim, anti-criminal conservative social commentary about the broken state of the law and the justice system in general. Some lines in the movie almost struck me as prophetic: if only 1973-era Harry could see the shithole that is the San Francisco of today. And given how heroes are written these days, it was nice to see that Harry, when he's in a gun battle, doesn't score a head shot with every single round: he misses a lot, being fallible like a normal human being.

This is an action film from the 1970s, though, so a person shouldn't expect too much wit or complexity from the script. Movies like the Dirty Harry films were, if anything, the template on which later action films were modeled. This certainly isn't one of my top-two Dirty Harry films (that honor would go to "Dirty Harry," which turned out to be surprisingly awesome when I first saw it, and to "Sudden Impact," which is packed with hilariously quotable lines and an awesome revenge sequence at the end), but it did leave us with the oft-repeated quote, "A man's got to know his limitations." In all, "Magnum Force" is dumb and entertaining. I'd call it a mid-tier Dirty Harry outing at best.