Eastwood report: The Enforcer

Harry Callahan is angry again, which is a good thing, but now he’s a little too angry, and his anger is a little too general — he’s not angry at anything in particular, he’s just kind of angry. Situations that used to make him squint and sneer and move on now get him hopping mad. He seethes and grimaces throughout The Enforcer, looking for a target for his free-floating rage.

As Magnum Force reduces Dirty Harry to melodrama, The Enforcer reduces it to poor melodrama. Just about everything is off. The photography in Dirty Harry was gritty, and the photography in Magnum Force was glossy, but the photography in The Enforcer is merely pretty, lots of high-key light designed to make shooting fast and easy, which unfortunately makes it look like a high-end television cop show, not a feature film (the above still is one of the more well-lit).  The plot, too, seems unusually TV-like: "On this week’s episode of Dirty Harry, Harry is teamed with — a woman?! and hilarity ensues."

The casting, like Harry’s anger, is disastrously general — with the exception of Tyne Daly as Harry’s new partner, most of the actors look exactly like actors, you don’t believe any of them are actually doing the things the script needs them todo. That The Enforcer came out in 1976, the high-water mark of 70s naturalism, makes it that much more disturbing. Here’s a movie on screen the same year as Rocky, All the President’s Men, Network, The Bad News Bears, Taxi Driver, and Jaws, to say nothing of Eastwood’s second-best movie ever, The Outlaw Josey Wales. Those movies are impeccably cast, with large groups of actors delivering great performances in roles both large and small down to one-line walk-ons, and yet here’s Clint Eastwood casting a bunch of "types" in a generic cop drama who look, for all the world, like kids playing cops ‘n’ robbers. The chief offender is the actor playing the head bad guy, who’s supposed to be the cutthroat, bloodthirsty head of a desperate, ruthless terrorist organization but looks frighteningly like Will Ferrell in Semi-Pro.

The production design simply looks cheap — rooms look brand new, blank and hastily constructed. Even some of the set dressing is off — different modes of decoration and art are jammed together in rooms without any kind of point of view. Worse, the San Francisco of Dirty Harry has gone, in five short years, from being a dark, dingy haven for psychopaths to being a bright, sun-filled tourist destination. All of SF’s big attractions are on display — Coit Tower, Alcatraz, the Marina, Ghiardelli Square, the Transamerica building, City Hall — Harry does everything but ride a cable car and eat Rice-a-Roni.

The script engages Harry in the main mystery sooner than Magnum Force does, but then the mystery completely unravels before it needs to be solved. The bad-guy terrorists plot is: kill some gas-company guys, steal their truck, use the truck to gain access to a warehouse storing rocket launchers, steal the rocket launchers, carry them off in the stolen gas-company truck, then use the rocket-launchers as a tool to extort millions of dollars from the city. Harry spends the bulk of the story trying to piece together the truck and the warehouse and the rocket launchers and the members of the terrorist group, but then the terrorists never get around to using their hard-earned rocket launchers. No sooner do they get their rocket launchers but they kidnap the mayor and hold him for ransom, which means that they never really needed the rocket launchers to begin with.

Even the stunt work, which was so startling and visceral in Magnum Force, is lacklustre and routine here — a lot of dashing around places with guns and posing. Bad guys say "Argh" and wince when they die, and good guys say wistful, bittersweet goodbyes before gasping, twitching and staring skyward.