Wonderful Movie

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

A hero is nothing without a decent villain, and in this third entry in Clint Eastwood's lucrative franchise there's a sore lack of good villainy.In an alarmingly contemporary move, the SFPD decide to partner Harry with a new female sidekick as there are not enough women on the force and they want to be seen as "progressive". Harry it's a bad idea, and he's right, but that female just happens to be Kate Moore, a young (and actually quite beautiful) Tyne Daly - dead ringer for Clea Duvall. She's bumbling and naive, but they end up making a good team.As Harry goes about his usual carefree method of taking down the secondary bad guys who always seem to cross his path, a group of paramilitary types are planning a terrorist attack in San Francisco and earn Harry's wrath when they kill DiGiorgio. Together with Kate, he shakes down the usual suspects across town leading to a showdown on Alcatraz Island (before he escaped it).While it is a fun watch, the bad guys are simply not a consistent, or interesting, threat for the 96-minute duration. They were completely one-dimensional and I didn't care about their evil plan. The final confrontation on Alcatraz is poorly staged and written and it seems like they were just rushing along the production to get the film finished as soon as possible.Not a bad movie, just not up to the standards of the first two.

I have a bit of problems with this flick. To be honest, there isn't that much of typical Dirty Harry style to see, yes, I know, he do has a one-liner, this time it's "marvellous" but somehow this flick let me down.It isn't the performances that are letting me down but the script itself. This time Callahan has a new partner, a woman and naturally it's against his nature to make a deal with her but after a while they do work fine together and you know that it will have a bad ending but somehow it's a bit too much of working together then the typical macho shoot to kill stuff.What was nice to see are the freeway bridges that were build in San Fran but were destroyed in 1989 by the Loma Prieta earthquake. I still can remember the collapse of a section of the double-deck Nimitz Freeway. On the other hand at the end they are on the Alcatraz Island and have a look how terrible it was back then even when it was just opened for public. Not bad as a flick on it's own but not good for a Dirty Harry franchise. Gore 0/5 Nudity 1/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

Back in the Eighties when I was still watching network TV, I used to catch Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless in 'Cagney and Lacey', their female detective team-up in which they cooperated in both their professional and personal lives. I couldn't help thinking back then that it was Daly's role in "The Enforcer" that recommended her for the part in the TV series. Even when watching the movie today, Daly as a cop doesn't quite click with me, but that's probably just a personal bias. Even so, it bothered me that she got wasted at the end of the story, as her chemistry with Clint Eastwood seemed to improve over the course of the picture.Maybe you had to live during the era, but it seemed that right after the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1973, action movies of the time described militant gangs with names like The Peoples' Revolutionary Strike Force and it used to bug me no end. Another one was the International Liberation Army from the 1977 TV flick "The Night They Took Miss Beautiful". All these liberation armies and strike forces and they never accomplished a thing except grabbing headlines and making a nuisance of themselves. Oh well.Certainly Harry Callahan didn't start out being an equal opportunity partner and given the situations he found himself in, was as far removed from political correctness territory as circumstances allowed. His training scenarios for new recruits were priceless, and he never did get far with his cruelty to animals exercise with Mrs. Grey from the mayor's office. Kate Moore (Daly) had to summon all of her intestinal fortitude to get beyond Harry's prescription of getting married and having kids; fortunately small arms training stood her well in taking out Sister Wanda (Samantha Doane) at the activist priest's church.Hey, I don't know if this was intentional or not, but remember the beat down Harry gave to the guy at the whorehouse? He used the plunger method on a guy named Buchinski (Robert Hoy), and I had to wonder if that wasn't a subliminal tribute to another action star of the Seventies, Charles Bronson. Bronson's real last name was Buchinski, I thought that was kind of cool.Well you just knew one of those Laws rockets would have to come in handy to close out the story. Dirty Harry liked to do things his own way, and what better way then to go out with a big bang. And to think, creepy Bobby saw it coming and couldn't do a thing about it.

The shootouts, chases and explosions in this, the third "Dirty Harry film", are enough to satisfy any action movie fan but what makes "The Enforcer" different to its predecessors is its humour. A number of sharp one-liners and the outrageous methods employed by Detective Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) provide a lot of laughs but additionally, his interactions with his new female partner and his incompetent superiors create a whole series of other situations which are also great fun to watch.Harry, of course, is a walking anachronism and a male chauvinist and these qualities often get him into trouble. He does, however, have a recognised talent for dealing with some very challenging cases in a particularly forceful way and it's this ability that frequently enables him to extricate himself from the difficulties that his behaviour leads him into.When Callahan and his partner Detective Inspector Frank DiGiorgio (John Mitchum) arrive at a liquor store robbery where the gunmen have taken hostages and demanded a car, Callahan simply gets into his police vehicle and drives it at great speed through the store-front windows before shooting and killing all the robbers. His quick, simple and effective way of dealing with this dangerous situation isn't appreciated by his superiors who promptly transfer him from the homicide division to the personnel department.In his new role, Callahan takes part in a series of interviews with candidates who are being considered for promotion to inspector and openly shows his disgust at the imposition of quotas to ensure that a requisite number of women are appointed to these posts. In one interview with a candidate called Kate Moore (Tyne Daly), his questions reveal that she's spent all her career doing office work and has no experience in the field and has never even made an arrest. Callahan's scepticism about promoting people with no proof of their competence in the field leads to him being branded a Neanderthal and his concern about their safety on the streets is also summarily dismissed.After DiGiorgio is killed attempting to arrest a group of terrorists who are in the process of stealing rocket launchers, explosives and a variety of other weapons from a munitions warehouse, Callahan is reassigned to homicide with a new partner, Detective Inspector Kate Moore. The way in which this unlikely partnership tracks down the terrorists who try to hold the city of San Francisco to ransom, surprisingly leads to them becoming friends before their mission reaches its action-packed climax at Alcatraz Island.It's interesting that in "Magnum Force" Callahan's attitude to vigilantism changed because of what happened in that story and similarly, in "The Enforcer", his experience of working with a woman who showed her competence and bravery, leads to a certain softening of his attitude to the idea of women working in the homicide division. With his eyes narrowed and his teeth clenched, Clint Eastwood again does a good job of showing Callahan's disdain for various types of people but it's in his scenes with Tyne Daly that he shows greater subtlety as Callahan's new partner gradually starts to win his respect and friendship.