Review – The Enforcer

Here’s a cake made from the same ingredients and baked in the same pan they used for the first two Dirty Harry movies. Only the vaguely eerie theme music is missing. But somehow it just doesn’t come out right. Perhaps the criminals – a bunch of hippie revolutionaries – are just a little too dated to take seriously. Perhaps the race and gender issues, as vintage 1976 as the hippie revolutionaries, are a little too intrusive. Perhaps the clichés are just, well, a little too cliché. Personally, I blame the script. More specifically, it seems like Dirty Harry just isn’t dirty enough. Sure, he kills a butt-load of criminals. But he’s just not as mean as he was the first time around (nor for that matter is he as mean as he is in the fourth one). Heck, he doesn’t even have a good line like “make my day” or the infamous “44 Magnum” speech. The closest he comes is when he tells the soft-on-crime police chief “You’re mouthwash ain’t makin’ it.” This isn’t a bad example of the action genre. It just doesn’t measure up to the standards of the series. Mildly amusing