Review – Sudden Impact

Those of us who survived the Reagan 80s will forever remember this as the movie that gave us “Go ahead, make my day.” Clint Eastwood is back for his fourth go-around as Inspector Harry Calahan, in a story that seems like a reheated version of Magnum Force with the villains from Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left substituted for vigilante cops. But whereas the previous Dirty Harry movies carefully skirted the difference between a little healthy disrespect for the Bill of Rights and outright wanton lawlessness, I guess the conservative zeitgeist allowed that bubble to be pressed even further, maybe even broken. As a result, this sequel loses the aura of social commentary that helped make the action in the first two so interesting, replacing it with an ethos holding that criminal violence, shown in a graphic, brutal rape sequence, is sufficient justification for – shall we say – a direct response. Even so, the action sequences are sufficiently well crafted to make this a genre classic. Caveat: if you watch the edited-for-television version, you won’t get the full impact of the famous “dog shit” speech toward the beginning. Mildly amusing