Here’s a Dirty
Harry movie where I felt the co-star outshone the lead actor himself. It’s not
that Clint Eastwood didn’t deliver a great performance as usual—it’s the same
old Dirty Harry behavior we’re all used to—but in The Enforcer, his
co-star and partner, Tyne Daly, held her own beside Harry and delivered such a
masterful performance that it made it easy for me to overlook the crappy
script.
The movie isn’t
great and I felt I wasted my time seeing it; it feels like a lame excuse to
make another Dirty Harry film. My biggest issue was the villains. In the
first Dirty Harry, we had Scorpio, who was insane in so many ways. He was
a serial killer with a one-track mind who would stop at nothing to get the
money he wanted from the government. That’s when we got our first real taste of
Dirty Harry.
In the second movie (Magnum Force), we had another group of insane cops who
turned themselves into judge and jury, going around town taking down every bad
guy they could find. Again, Harry had to step up, especially after one of his
friends got caught in the crossfire.
But here, we have a bunch of guys with a weird and divided purpose, blowing
things up and getting taken out one after another like rats. From the
beginning, it felt like they never stood a chance against this duo, and in the
end, thanks to a bazooka, they didn’t.
I didn’t get the
same sense of challenge as I did in the first Dirty Harry movie, nor
did I enjoy the chase like in the second. Instead, it was just a bunch of crazy
guys and a priest caught in the middle who wasn’t doing the right thing.
Then there’s
Inspector Kate Moore (Tyne Daly), who gave the movie the spin it needed. She
was up to the task as Harry’s partner and even saved his life during the film.
She stole the show in the brief time she was on screen and made the movie worth
watching.
I would’ve enjoyed this movie more if the script had been better tuned to match the first two Dirty Harry films I saw, where Harry had to think outside the box to survive. Here, he just needed a good partner who always knew how to save the day when Harry was too busy being Harry.
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