Clint Eastwood reprises his role as San Francisco police detective Harry Callahan in this sequel to the original "Dirty Harry". If you have a taste for criminals getting their due, you'll find a lot to like in this story, as Callahan's instincts put him on the trail of dirty cops who fancy themselves as judge, jury and executioner in their haste to dispatch the city's bad guys. A minor twist you can probably see coming has Harry's boss, Lieutenant Briggs (Hal Holbrook), as the leader of the rogue motorcycle cops who pretty much lets them decide on their own targets. The scene in which one of them guns down an entire swimming pool party was probably a wrong headed move in as much as there were probably some innocent guests in attendance, but it didn't seem to concern anyone investigating. Callahan's early statement about a man knowing his limitations is repeated a couple more times throughout the story, and sets up the final curtain for Briggs when Harry sets a timer on a bomb he discovered in his mail box. Oddly, of the four rookie cops who made up the ad hoc assassination team, Harry managed to take out three of them without firing a shot. He ran into one on a motorcycle with a car, pounded the crap out of a second, and managed somehow to have the third one careen off a parking deck into the bay. I found it interesting that three of the rogue policemen wound up portraying good guy lawmen in TV shows during their careers, David Soul in the Seventies series 'Starsky and Hutch', Robert Urich as a member of 'S. W. A. T.' in the Eighties, and Tim Matheson as a sheriff in the 'Wolf Lake' series in 2001-2002.
Review of Magnum Force
