Review: Sudden Impact

In this fourth outing, Clint Eastwood is back as hard-arse, non-PC detective Harry Callahan, who after yet another perp walks due to a lack of evidence and after his general refusal to do anything by-the-book pisses off his superiors, is given a vacation. Well, sort of. He is shunted off to a small-town precinct not too far out of San Fran, in order to help investigate a serial killing case. The audience already knows that the killer is a woman, gang-rape victim Sondra Locke (whose sister was also a victim and left pretty much a vegetable as a result), who is killing the gang members (who include a sleazy Paul Drake) one by one, shooting them in the head and…the other head. However, it should be noted that one of the rapists is a butch lesbian played by Audrie Neenan. On the side, we have the small-town police chief (Pat Hingle) treating Harry like crap, and mobster underlings pissed off at Harry for kinda sorta causing nasty a Mafioso (uncredited Michael V. Gazzo) to have a fatal heart attack. Also, Harry actually meets Locke before knowing who she is. Bradford Dillman turns up as an a-hole San Francisco police captain who hates Harry’s methods, and series regular Albert Popwell (who plays different roles in each film) plays Horace, Harry’s one African-American friend, to show he’s totally not racist.

 

By far the nadir of the “Dirty Harry” series, this 1983 flick from director/star Clint Eastwood (“White Hunter, Black Heart”, “Play Misty For Me”, “Million Dollar Baby”) and screenwriter Joseph C. Stinson (the appalling “City Heat”) is cheap, offensive trash. It feels like two terrible vigilante movies awkwardly strung together, and indeed co-writers Charles B. Pierce and Earl E. Smith (the men behind the cult film “The Town That Dreaded Sundown”) apparently had written a separate film for Locke, before Stinson came along and reappropriated it for a Dirty Harry film. The seams show at all times. Part Charles Bronson vigilante movie and part “I Spit on Your Grave”, it’s boring and rambling, a film that is as empty as it is too busy. The film is actually just plain sloppy at times, with seriously misplaced humour (whether it’s the goofy bus scene, the comic relief dog, or the ‘black comedy’ of a hot dog/severed penis joke) that really ought not be here. I also think the Mafioso subplot just clutters things unnecessarily. The film is already two films in one, it didn’t need that distraction as well.

 

Well-shot by Bruce Surtees (“Play Misty For Me”, “Dirty Harry”, “The Shootist”), but this is one-note crap, not helped by two uninspired lead performances. Eastwood spends much of the film wearing shades, and the rest of the film acting like he’s still wearing shades but they’re not helping keep the sun out of his eyes. In other words, he’s half-arsing it. Sondra Locke…doesn’t wear shades at all. She is flagrantly miscast in anything that requires an actress. She has a repellent screen presence and seems about as tough as Shelley Duvall in the first half of “The Shining”. Actress Audrie Neenan is pretty terrible as the mean ‘ol lesbian thug. It amazes me that she actually recovered from this to have quite a respectable career. It’s such an unfortunate character but Neenan’s performance is just too silly. Bradford Dillman gets very little screen time and just regurgitates lines that every preceding ‘cop/bureaucrat who hates Harry’s methods’ has already delivered. Michael V. Gazzo was probably glad not to receive credit, so that maybe no one will notice that he does the worst Michael V. Gazzo impersonation of all-time. Think about that for a second. Paul Drake, meanwhile is terrible as the lead villain, but is actually rather entertaining for some perverse reason. He’s that far over-the-top. There’s not a lot of entertainment here, so I’ll take what I can get, intentional or not. The best (legit) performances probably come from Pat Hingle and Albert Popwell, but neither is around enough to make much of a difference, really.

 

Eastwood is apparently a ‘socially liberal’ Conservative in real-life, but you wouldn’t know it from watching this homophobic, misogynistic and racist film. Yes, the film has an African-American as one of the good guys here (Popwell), but if you don’t think this film is racist…just look at the African-American gang early on. Oh, and Popwell may be a good guy here, but he still suffers from that other stereotype for African-Americans in films (I won’t spoil it for those not in the know). The misogyny is obvious, with Sondra Locke’s lady killer (who uses a phallic symbol for a weapon of course).

 

As for the homophobia? In Clint’s worldview here, apparently lesbians are uncouth loudmouth degenerates who are really just frustrated ugly straight girls. Watch this film and tell me that’s not what he and Stinson are saying. Or better yet, don’t watch the film, it belongs at the bottom of the heap of Eastwood films with “The Eiger Sanction”, “The Rookie”, “City Heat”, and “Tightrope”. It’s like the first two films in the series, only uglier, boring, and completely dumbed-down. At least the first two were well-made, right-wing or not. This one’s only useful if you want to watch someone get a trivia question wrong when they confidently claim that ‘Go Ahead, Make My Day’ came from the first “Dirty Harry”. Well, first of all, it was re-appropriated from a line in “Vice Squad” which was made in 1982, but “Sudden Impact” is the only “Dirty Harry” film to use it. How in the hell was this crap not a Cannon/Golan-Globus film? Composer Lalo Schifrin (“The Cincinnati Kid”, “Cool Hand Luke”, “Bullitt”, “Kelly’s Heroes”) doesn’t have his finest hour here, mixing annoying jazz with hideous disco pop. Final straw is the end credits song ‘This Side of Heaven’ by Roberta Flack, mistakenly under the impression that she’s doing a (bad) Bond theme.

 

Rating: D