Mr-Fusion For a while, "Sudden Impact" plays like a a highlight reel of Dirty Harry's signature moves. The altercations occur one after another, his superiors are pretty much meaningless, and Eastwood scowls all throughout. Forget rationalizing his actions; it's just entertaining. Up until that second half at least, which is when things turn towards dramatic as a serial killer/revenge flick. There's still the body count, but it's not as fun as seeing Eastwood laying down larger-than-life street justice. Take that early coffee shop robbery for example; a well-staged shootout that almost brings The Man With No Name to mind. It's terrific. 6/10

MartinHafer Dirty Harry movies have never been what anyone would term 'family friendly'. There's nudity, some crude language and lots of violence. However, "Sudden Impact" notches it all up several notches and at times it all just seemed gratuitous and unnecessary...especially with scenes of the dog, Meathead, peeing and farting all the time as well as everything about the red-headed 'lady'--her character was just gross and over the top.Not surprisingly, this film begins with a lot of folks being snuffed by Harry. However, when he did this in previous films, he was acting as a cop...doing his job. Here, however, Callahan seems to think that civil rights simply don't apply to scum-bags--such as the guy who's induced to have a fatal heart attack by Harry's tactics. Clearly, this is a morals-impaired incarnation of Callahan. However, because of these tactics, Harry is wanted by various hit men and his bosses (again) are tired of all the violence and negative publicity. So, they send him to dig up information about a murder that points back to the fictional city of San Paulo. There he meets an odd lady (Sondra Locke), an incredibly uncooperative and grouchy police chief (Pat Hingle) and a farting/peeing dog. And, at the same time, several murders with the exact same m.o. begin taking place in San Paulo.So is all this any good? Well, I loved the vigilante story line quite a bit. It's just that all the rest of the film is just oppressively sleazy and gross...to the point where I think the series took a definite step backwards with this one. Interestingly, however, financially this was the big winner in the Dirty Harry series-- raking in tons 'o bucks.

seymourblack-1 In the first three "Dirty Harry" movies, Detective Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) was seen as the maverick cop whose contempt for his superiors, the justice system and the rulebook regularly got him into trouble and in "Sudden Impact" nothing has really changed. He continues to survive in his job because his unorthodox methods get results but periodically, the costs of his actions in terms of expenses, physical destruction and bad publicity become so great that he temporarily has to be taken out of the firing line for the benefit of everyone involved.One of these situations arises again after the San Francisco cop shoots dead a whole group of criminals who were robbing a diner and then shortly after, confronts a local crime boss at his grand-daughter's wedding, in such a way that the old man suffers a fatal heart attack. Callahan, typically, is furious about being forced to take an unscheduled vacation but is left with no other choice.Unfortunately, when he's on vacation, Callahan gets attacked by a group of the crime boss' men and kills three of them before eliminating another group of thugs who try to kill him because he'd arrested one of their number who'd recently appeared in court but had been freed on a technicality. In the circumstances, Callahan gets assigned to a murder case which takes him to San Paulo, a nearby small town where he becomes friendly with a woman called Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke) and also finds that the local police chief, Lester Jennings (Pat Hingle), is openly hostile to the presence of a big city cop and has no intention of providing any assistance or co-operation.More killings (which are all carried out in the same way) follow and Callahan discovers that ten years earlier, the victims were all involved in the brutal gang-rape of Jennifer Spencer and her younger sister who'd remained in a catatonic state ever since. Callahan's methods for bringing murderers to justice are normally very simple and straight forward but, in this case, he decides that a rather different course of action is more appropriate."Sudden Impact" delivers its entertaining combination of action and humour at a brisk pace and features a punchy script which is full of witty one-liners and of course, the legendary catchphrase, "Go ahead. Make my day". The quality of the acting is very effective throughout with Clint Eastwood on great form. This was the only movie in the "Dirty Harry" series that Eastwood also directed and his work in relation to the action sequences and those where he makes good use of light and shadows to create the desired atmosphere are top class.Every crime thriller needs an interesting villain and Jennifer Spencer certainly fits the bill because she's a tragic victim, a brutal serial killer and also an artist whose works express her anguish very powerfully. This traumatised woman with a blank expression had, for ten years, harboured her hatred of the rapists and her absolute despair for her sister's predicament and although she might have derived some short-term satisfaction from carrying out her killing spree, it definitely wouldn't have brought her any closer to a cure for her ills.Audiences know exactly what they're going to get with a "Dirty Harry" film and on the evidence of the huge box office receipts for "Sudden Impact", no-one was disappointed this time around.

luke-a-mcgowan You know those Simpsons episodes where they do the running gag "McGarnagle"? The one which is a thin parody of Harry Callahan? I'm now less convinced that McGarnagle is a parody, and more convinced that it was a discarded script of this movie which the Simpsons creators used. Sudden Impact is so stupid that its funny. Most bad action films are just boring - A Walk Among the Tombstones comes to mind. But Sudden Impact is just so cartoonish and stupid that I burst out laughing every few minutes. This film has every single cliché that I didn't think was actually a thing that ever exists. The small town cop who shouts at Callahan "we don't need big city folks telling us how to do our jobs". The threats to "back off or I'll have you locked up!". Mandatory vacations for cops who are too badass. The constant references to vague authority figures who are "climbing up my ass" says a generic slightly lower authority figure. This film's screenplay is actually hilarious. Harry goes to the beach to a crime scene, where a big deal is made of the fact that the inspector goes there himself. The inspector demands to know what happened at Harry's hotel room (Harry gunned down a would-be assassin), like Harry broke a lamp or something. It'd be funny if they hadn't just made a big deal of the fact that this is a dead body. Sudden Impact has no story arc for Harry - its just a series of scenes where nameless henchmen try to kill him and he survives with increasingly comedic implausibility. Seriously - there are like 5 attempts on his life in 30 minutes. Each time, he dispatches them and carries on his business - walking his dog (which has several sex changes throughout the movie), irritating his boss, practising his shooting, etc. Cut into these inane sequences is the story of Jennifer Spencer (an extremely dull Sondra Locke) who is seeking out and murdering all of her rapists. At one point, Eastwood (who is behind the camera as director, would you believe it) accidentally inspires the Kill Bill revenge flashes with a scene that only highlights how much better Tarantino did it 20 years later. Spencer is such a boring character - her chemistry with Eastwood is non-existent and the final struggle with Head Rapist is just motions while we wait for Harry to show up.Eastwood is one of my favourite directors but there are some dreadful shots that should never have gotten through here. An old lady yanks a sniper rifle out from the counter to threaten Harry, who is assaulting witnesses to gain testimony (seriously?) Several various people are shot in the head and noticeably still breathing as their actors incompetently go through their death scenes. And in the film's most ludicrous scene, Harry drives a burning car along the pier, looking at the flames as if they are a minor irritation, before parking, exiting, reaching back into the flames and throwing a molotov at the attackers, who are all killed.This movie would have been more plausible if Harry was revealed to be a T-1000. Its so stupid its hilarious. I give it three stars - two stars just for the awesome line "go ahead, make my day".