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Dirty Harry 4: Sudden Impact (1983)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to look up which Dirty Harry is which. None have been as spectacular as the first, but this fourth entry - Sudden Impact is quite strong. It's a vast improvement over The Enforcer thanks to a great villain and a different take on Detective Harry Callahan’s approach to police justice.

In San Francisco, artist Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke) murders one of the men who raped her and her sister years ago. Inspector ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood, who also directs) is investigating the crime. Considering his unorthodox approach to justice, will the officer and serial killer see eye-to-eye?

There’s a lot of good stuff here and the only thing that stops this sequel from being on the same level as the first is a few action movie moments. In Sudden Impact, when a bad guy gets it, they have to be annihilated in a spectacularly absurd fashion. These scenes stick out as overly movie-like compared to the rest of the film, which is largely grounded in reality. You wonder how Harry will handle Jennifer once he learns the truth. They have a lot in common and unlike the antagonists from Magnum Force, she isn’t taking things too far – if that is possible when we are talking about murder. As an audience member, you don’t know whom to cheer for. You can’t go around shooting people in the face, but if anyone’s got just cause, it’s her.

As Jennifer tracks down her targets one by one, we find that they're surprisingly well-defined. In most films, a rapist is just a rapist. If they have other personality traits, they might also love kicking puppies or be raging homophobes. Basically, they’re inhuman monsters who have managed to pass off as regular people. Here, it isn’t that simple – at least not in every case. Whether you like to think so or not, even criminals are human beings. Sudden Impact makes us consider the need for due process and trials. It makes you wonder what Callahan will do when he puts all the clues together.

Sudden Impact also brings to us one of the series’ most enduring and memorable catchphrases: “Go ahead, make my day”. There are plenty of good action scenes, bad people get their satisfying comeuppance and it features the second-best villain of the series (actually I should say “antagonist”, not “villain”). It’s a solid entry. (On DVD, February 24, 2018)