Sudden Impact (1983)

Missed! Ha ha!

Genre: Action Crime Drama Thriller Serial

Starring: Clint Eastwood (The Bridges of Madison County • A Fistful of Dollars), Sondra Locke (The Outlaw Josey Wales • Every Which Way But Loose)

Directed By: Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven • Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil)

Overview: Harry Callahan is sent to spend some time away from San Francisco when his feud with a crime boss escalates to dangerous proportions.  Instead of a vacation, however, he finds himself in pursuit of a killer with a score to settle.

The Dirty Harry series is not genius. It's a mainstream sort of thing starring an American Icon who plays Harry, an average-Joe tough son-of-a-bitch with a chip on his shoulder, and it seems that this new chapter takes us one step closer to him earning vigilante status.

In Sudden Impact, Harry seems to just love stepping over the line.  His harassment of a mob boss makes him enemy number one in the syndicate and Harry is sent to a small port town until things cool down. Enter Jennifer Spencer, an angry young rape victim who has taken it upon herself to exact vengeance when the system let her and her sister down so many years ago.

The problems with Sudden Impact are varied. Aside from the continuity of having Albert Popwell playing a cop when he just played a black militant in the last Dirty Harry film, The Enforcer (excusable enough), we find Dirty Harry with a different gun in the climactic final scene. Personally, I missed the hard iron of the old-school Magnum, no matter how much pomp the new one got. But these are just simple aesthetic details.  The real issue is that we find Harry painted into an ethical dilemma that either decision would end with the audience doubting Harry's decision.  For everything that's come before, I'm not of the opinion that such a straight-forward guy should ever have been presented with such nuanced Nietzsche-grade moralizing.

Still, for everything this film has going against it, Sudden Impact has its moments.  The story is solid (for as much as the main plot shouldn't belong to Harry Callahan's character), the final climactic scene is impressive indeed, taking place amidst carousels and a roller coaster in an empty fairground at night - tres hauntingly Noir. Then there's the fact that Sudden Impact has been immortalized in the history of film. In a scene that sums up Dirty Harry in one perfect telling moment, we find Harry, pointing a .44 Magnum at a armed robber, as said armed robber points his gun at a hostage, threatening to kill her. 

Harry looks him dead in the eye, ignoring the hostage completely, grinding his teeth and earning Sudden Impact's place at the #6 slot of AFI's 100 movie quotes list with "Go ahead, make my day."

 
Harry gets a new gun even! NO!

Overall Rating: 74% (Packs A Bit of A Punch...)

Aftertaste:

I'd say that Sudden Impact the first film that really begins its drift away from the fun formula that the Dirty Harry series is known for. That makes some sense, since the original plan was to leave it as a trilogy and not expanded to the five film series it ended up being made into.

All told, Sudden Impact is the kind of film that, though it has a telling formula, also has character and atmosphere, and sometimes, that's just enough to go on to have a fun tough-cop-action night.

I mean hello, it's Clint!