Finishing off the year with the conclusion of something I wanted to finish a long time ago. 

Seems like I'm doing one of these every two years (not intentionally) but let's move on from the first two Dirty Harry films which I really, really like to the third which could be alternately called Dirty Harry 3: Contractual Obligation; the fourth which is solid and the fifth and final one which teeters dangerously on the edge of being so bad its good. Won't be going point by point as with the other two because we're doing three movies, none of which I like enough to do that for. Hell, I'm tossing them all together in one post for a good reason, after all.

 As noted in the intro, The Enforcer feels more like a contractual obligation from Clint than anything he really wanted to do. Harry is back in the saddle again, going up against some garden variety domestic terrorists led by the thoroughly uninteresting Bobby Maxwell who is as thin and cardboard a villain as one could ever hope to find. The bad guys are plotting to kidnap the mayor abut the main focus is on Harry and his partnership with Tyne Daly as a junior officer. The two have a nice chemistry and their dialogue is good but it generally is a bad thing when the most interesting thing in your action movie has nothing to do with the action part of the story for the most part.

Apart from the B plot with these two, you get some fun moments between Harry and Bradford Dillman as his boss of the week, though he does appear in the next film but as a different character which is weird. There is also an enjoyable bit where Harry breaks up a robbery by driving a car through the store window the bad guys are in and the finale on Alcatraz is decent.

That aside, this is a tired, formulaic 70's action film (complete with the 70's downer ending as Daly goes the way of most of Harry's partners, an early grave) with a dull villain who is nowhere near a strong enough character to earn the rocket launcher demise he is granted at the end. The Enforcer is my least favorite of the series.

Sudden Impact marks several firsts for the series. The first one Eastwood directed; the first one from the 80's and the first one to have Sondra Locke Clint's then-girlfriend and frequent co-star for most of the late seventies in it. Locke plays a rape victim hell bent on wasting the gang of thugs who assaulted her and her sister and as luck would have it, Harry ends up investigating the murders. It's an interesting story well told and it ends up being a rather neat variation on the standard rape/revenge film. Clint keeps things moving at a nice clip, maintaining a dark tone for when Locke is onscreen and a somewhat lighter one when Harry is the focus, but never lets things become too heavy as some films of its ilk can get. Put bluntly, you can watch this rape/revenge film and not feel the need to take a shower afterwards.

That being said, it does have a few flaws as the film sort of fights between being a regular Clint Eastwood movie and telling the actual story it wants to tell. Pat Hingle is okay as the father of the one of the rapists and local police chief though as tends to be the case when he works with Clint, he goes a little overboard at times (his last scene is solid however). Another issue is that, as with the preceding and following films, the main villain is sort of undefined and not terribly interesting. Granted, the main focus is on Locke who is committing the killings Harry is looking into, but it is sort of hard to really enjoy seeing the bastard get what's coming to him when you can barely remember his name. Having Locke need Harry to rescue her at the end is bit of an off beat as well. I probably would have had them both shoot the guy to death and then have Harry let her go as he does in the film but that's just me. Still a solid entry in the series.

While the story is compelling, the best scene is the obligatory "Harry does things his own way" scene which sees him bust up a coffee shop hold up and uttering the famous "Go ahead, make my day" line. It's the best bit in the film though its really just there to give Harry something to do in the first fifteen minutes seeing as this really isn't his story per se. The film, while still good, sort of fights to match that scene for the remaining hour and forty minutes.

 The Dead Pool ends things with a film that is both entertainingly dumb and frustratingly perfunctory. Harry is back for one last run, this time pursuing a psycho who is offing celebrities who all happen to be on a 'dead pool' list: a vague competition betting on when certain famous folks will kick off. Clint is his usual grumpy self, growling out lines and shooting bad guys but like the third film, the lack of a solid villain really shoots the film in the leg. Liam Neeson is fine as a flashy red herring of a director but he vanishes from the last act. The real bad guy is essentially a cipher and like Bobby Maxwell in the third one, isn't nearly interesting enough to warrant the over the top spear gun kill that ends him. Still, there are some fun lines, an early role for Jim Carrey and an utterly silly but fun homage to the car chase in Bullitt involving a small remote control car packed with C-4 chasing Harry in his real car. It ends the series with a small pop rather than a big bang but it's enjoyable enough.

The Dirty Harry films are an interesting quintet of films ranging from provocative 70's cinema to 80's style and flash. The first one is a bona fide classic (though part of it don't hold up so well) and the sequels are a bit of a roller coaster. Clint Eastwood became a mega star off the success of the first two and gradually outgrew the series. Of the two franchises he has been a part of, the Dollars Trilogy is the best series he was involved in, but Dirty Harry is probably his most iconic.