This is a fortunate sequel. The detailed preproduction of Dirty Harry meant there was plenty of unused material on tap, all of a high quality, ready to apply towards a sequel. (Consider similarly how half the action sequences in Temple of Doom were meant for Raiders of the Lost Ark.) And for as much as screenwriter John Milius may have influenced the final form of the Harry Callahan character, it is here where Milius’ plot notions really flower, the screenplay only now officially attributed to him (and Michael Cimino, of The Deer Hunter, ‘cause the Dirty Harry movies were never hurting for talent).
Dirty Harry’s wake was dominated by a certain amount of criticism and controversy, equating it with fascism, which delayed the film’s eventual classic status. As such, a sequel would be remiss not to address such matters. Magnum Force effectively flips the argument and message of Dirty Harry, switching from the simplistic “vigilantism good” to an equally simplistic “vigilantism bad.” Well, it’s not so simple, in either case, but that’s the gist of it.
And okay, Magnum Force?! That’s no sequel title. I mean, you’d expect it to be Dirty Harry 2: Dirtier Harry, or something like that. Ah, but the numbered sequel thing wasn’t in place in the seventies – The Godfather: Part II really instigated that particular trick, which was, surprisingly, a method to designate it as a non-cash in sequel (suggesting it’s a real continuation). But still, you’d expect at least Harry’s name in the sequel title, or something, for very few franchises can build upon truly standalone titles. The James Bond films are one of those titles, and they use the iconic PPK as a logo to bypass this issue. The Dirty Harry franchise similarly uses the iconic .44 Magnum – and come on, MAGNUM Force! Still, this title implies we have here a real movie, with its own story, that just happens to be a sequel. And the title even means something – see, there’s this force…of guys…with Magnums.
Director Don Siegel is no longer in the picture, replaced by Ted Post (who directed Clint Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High, and also did Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but I won’t hold that against him). It’s pointless trying to find a better movie on Post’s resume because, like Siegel, this is it. And the directing here is surely serviceable – stylistically, this is very much the same as Dirty Harry – but it all plays as a little more mainstream, with a reduction of urban decay and handheld grittiness.
Known gangster and murderer Ricca (Richard Devon) has just been acquitted of the Scarza murders, and is being ushered past the accumulated reporters through San Francisco’s beautiful City Hall (which you’ve seen at the ending of Raiders). So, right off the bat, we have an invocation of the broken justice system, the same scenario which lent Dirty Harry much of its thematic potency. Let us not think this indicates a retread, for the film is using this similar situation to get to its central reversal.
Ricca and a coterie of criminal chums drive along triumphantly in a black sedan. Eventually they are pulled over by a motorcycle traffic cop, who remains forever unrevealed behind his T-1000 helmet and glasses (‘cause this franchise continues to inspire the greats). Ricca’s cronies crow about how little a traffic cop can do to them – then the cop blows them all away with a Magnum! Hope you enjoyed that fake out with the mob, ‘cause here’s our villain.
(Already they’ve nearly equaled the body count of Dirty Harry. In the end, it will be five times what Dirty Harry could muster, even while individual acts of violence seem lessened in impact. That’s called sequel escalation.)
Harry’s back on the force, despite the ending of Dirty Harry. I can only picture him finagling the bureaucratic process in attempts to get another badge: “Yeah, I tossed the other one into a quarry in metaphorical defiance.” Anyway, Harry is joined by his partner “Early” Earlington Smith (Felton Perry, of television and all the RoboCop movies). To the movie’s temporary detriment, Harry is in stakeout now, not homicide, which raises the ire of his new superior, Lt. Neil Briggs (the ultra-talented Hal Holbrook, who never quite had a signature role). (Lieutenant Bressler from before is nowhere to be seen, which is needed because Briggs’ role is fundamentally different.) Unlike before, in this one Harry is always getting chewed out, which loses its potency. And for the first half of the movie, he’s not even actively investigating these killings. This sounds like a pretty big detriment, considering Dirty Harry’s tight plotting, but the general professionalism on display here does a fair amount to override this.
Harry and Briggs have a little conversation, outlining their relationship. Harry, whom we all know as gun-happy and take-no-prisoners, is contrasted with Briggs, who’s never in his career had to unholster his weapon. In Harry’s estimation, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”
Stakeout or no, Harry has a mob informant who may be of help, who runs a burger stand at the airport. This seems like a pretty random detour, because it is. Milius’ original script featured very little action (it was a “simple script”), so the majority of the action to be found here is tacked on in the truest sense of it – I’m not sure who the screenwriter (or second unit director) responsible is. Anyway, the real reason Harry’s at the airport is so he can face down some leftfield hijackers on some fictional airline’s plane. This is the equivalent to the bank robbery from the first, and the point where Magnum Force is most purely a retread sequel.
Harry boards the plane clad as a pilot, and makes an effort to maneuver the airplane. One of two unmotivated terrorists is just about clued to Harry’s plan when Harry slams on the brakes, overpowering said mook. He takes the mook’s gun, goes back, and shoots the second thug through a wall. This sequence is far lengthier than my write-up (Magnum Force is perhaps half an hour longer than it should be), but there’s not much to comment on. It works well enough, I guess, but it pales beside the Clint vs. punk stuff from before.
Let’s go back to the police station, and meet the rest of our cast. First up is Charlie McCoy (Mitch Ryan), Harry’s longtime friend who’s experienced recent suicidal tendencies. His dialogue sounds like something Harry would’ve said in the first one, lamenting how the spineless bimbos at the DA regard the thought of “cops killing hoods.”
Down at the firing range are four rookie motorcycle cops (hmm), who all carry Magnums (double hmm), and worship Harry unreservedly (multitudinous hmm). If Harry is a vicious, lawless cop, these guys are viciouser, lawlesser and coppier. They’re also copiers, for they parrot Harry in all they do. Amongst the four, we have leader Davis (David Soul, “Starsky & Hutch”), Grimes (Robert Urich, “S.W.A.T.”), and Sweet (Tim Matheson, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/ – one of these things is not like the other). Oh yeah, and there’s also Astrachan (Kip Niven), who for some reason doesn’t impress me nearly as much. There is talk of handguns and such, to which end Harry displays his proficiency with the Magnum:
I’ll just go and say it now – these four are our villains, a motorcycle cop death squad meant to rid San Francisco of its criminal element. I mean, the audience (but not Harry, not for another hour) has enough knowledge to piece it together already – it benefits the film’s message if we’re already in on this. And this is also a nice adversary for Harry, as it is clearly something different from old Scorpio. For one, these guys are a direct physical threat to him…perhaps not one-on-one, as rookies, but as a group. (Of course there’s sequel escalation in upping the villain quotient from one to four.) They’re dark shadows of Harry himself – I guess it’s not too original for a sequel to pit our hero against an evil opposite, but we need it to turn the tables on the whole vigilante thing.
It’s time for more vigilante justice to be meted out – now that we’ve prematurely identified the villains, might as well. One of them (only one) rides out to some mobster’s orgytastic pool party overlooking the city. Fans of celebrity nudity, here is an opportunity to see Suzanne Somers’ boobs. Here is also an opportunity to see Suzanne Somers’ boobs get shot up with machine gun fire, because in no time flat the cop has outright massacred the entire assembly dead! Ye gods, man, this scene alone doubles Dirty Harry’s collateral! And foul mobsters or no, I cannot believe that the ditsy, coked-up bimbettes on display here were as deserving of a violent thrashing death as old Fat Tony.
Harry’s storyline refuses to intersect all this rather mindless violence, which is a damn shame. His next scene sees him visiting McCoy’s wife, Carol (Christine White), her children rampaging in the next room over. She makes a pass at Harry, threatening to glom a little needless romance into this all-business franchise, when Early calls Harry up with a distraction. It seems the latest non sequitur action sequence is waiting.
In a situation that’s not entirely clear, a trio of robbers is holding up this chintzy swap meet, Early their hostage – I’ve no idea really when this happened, considering the phone call, but it affords some tense moments with the robber readying to execute Early on account of his being a black man. This is when Harry interrupts, as he’s been watching from behind a one-way mirror (it is a rather odd setup for a shootout). So let’s chalk up three more bodies to the count, though these are Harry’s (mostly), and therefore perfectly legal. Some actual adrenaline threatens to break out, but not too much can happen on that front in 1973. This is the pre-Bruckheimer era…to Magnum Force’s limitless benefit, meaning it gets to have content.
This movie really is just spinning its wheels randomly, waiting for Harry to get involved in the second half. The next sequence is the most completely out-of-place of them all, for it involves no character or plot threads from anyplace else…for a good 10 minutes or so. First up, a high-class prostitute (Margaret Avery, Academy Award nominee – for The Color Purple, fool, not for this) takes a cab ride. Was that sentence exciting? ‘Cause this is like 5 minutes worth of screen time. Then her ferocious pimp appears (Albert Popwell, also the famous “punk” from Dirty Harry), laying down the pimp’s patented slap.
Then, just for the R-rated hell of it, he kills his hooker with drain cleaner. Now, not only is this bit of violence almost totally purposeless in the movie as a whole, but it had tragic real world consequences. Now, Dirty Harry inspired its fair share of copycatting, but that was mostly bungled. This is Magnum Force’s sickening parallel: The Hi-Fi Murders. They would have happened anyway; Magnum Force was just the seasoning. Still, I’m upset that I just went ahead and researched these events, and I advise you not to do the same. It’s just…wrong.
Pimpmobile! That improves my mood! And that shot above happens to contain the highest combination of artistry and pimpmobile. And do you vaguely see that motorcycle cop in the back? That’s right, our murderous pimp buddy is about to become the death squad’s next victim – at the lamentable expense of that lovely pimpmobile’s interior. As much as this particular execution offers no new insight or plot developments, I guess there’s a little moral grayness to the proceedings – now that we’ve seen the pimp is a killer himself. In a sense, that’s more effective than the bland, token mobsters that make up the rest of the victim pool.
For the first time ever we see Harry Callahan’s apartment! Here comes his cute Japanese neighbor Sunny, to answer a question no one ever asked – Is Harry heterosexual? Jeebus, of course he is! Had they not set it in this particular city… Thankfully, this potentially plot-derailing detour only yields a single, steamy, softcore sex scene (featuring far above the daily recommended dosage of Clint Eastwood wrinkles), for it’s time for the movie to get back to its primary interest…
Bloody, context-free executions! Again it’s a mobster, now Lou Guzman, making like Caligula in his penthouse suite that is coincidentally under stakeout. Beholds naked buttocks of every gender! And along comes our beloved Pre-T 1000 motorcycle cop, climbing the building’s stairwell all suspenseful-like. He shoots the nude hedonists as dead as pimps, even prompting the female one to turn into a dummy and tumble off of the building’s balcony!
The motorcycle cop then descends to the building’s parking garage, doffing his helmet and revealing to be…Davis! Oh wait, we’d already figured that out. Moving on, McCoy is entering in his motorcycle uniform, sent here because those stakeout guys saw naked tumbling death. D’oh! And here’s where the death squad officially crosses the line, in case we didn’t count the dozen standers by – Davis executes policeman Charlie McCoy as a “witness.” Then he, acting the cop, corrals the gathering public outside and declares it a crime scene.
It is only now that Harry is asked to rejoin homicide and take part in this plotline – okay, it actually happened before the naked penthouse fiasco, but I felt like talking about that. (It would also otherwise oddly break up the tender Sunny sex.) Harry, being a competent police detective, instantly understands how some of these killings (Ricca and Herr Pimp) must’ve been the work of a traffic cop, but chief investigator Briggs will have none of it (hmm). Rather, Briggs has Harry stakeout (as a detective!) yet another uninspiring mobster – Palancio, he of the dock warehouses, ‘cause you can’t have a police actioner without dock warehouses. Harry rather intentionally blows this stakeout, following Palancio out of his jurisdiction and thoroughly pissing him off. Anything to deter pointless plot detours now that, in the second half, Harry can finally get down to business.
But with Briggs denying Harry the freedom he needs to investigate other cops, Harry will have to do this entirely on his own. This shall be done at the big annual shooting competition, where Davis (above) faces Harry in the final. Davis goes first, on the combat shooting range, getting a perfect score. We know Harry can somehow best perfection, only…he shoots a cop target instead. What may at first seem an uncharacteristic error is really a cunning plan – Harry has sent the villains a message. Nice!
With the competition officially over, Harry asks if he can borrow Davis’ Magnum, ostensibly to test it against his own. Here Harry makes another “mistake,” “missing” one target and sinking the bullet into the rear wall. This is really the opportunity for Harry to return later that night, retrieve Davis’ slug, and compare it to that found in McCoy. And it’s the real McCoy! – Sorry. Of course, Briggs chews Harry out for this latest accusation. And in the years that followed Magnum Force, it’s such a cliché for the superior to chew our hero out, this more than anything helps to blur our attention from the slowly obvious fact – Briggs is masterminding the death squads!
Briggs’ “hunches” (that is, who he wants dead) are driving this investigation, which is why Harry was assigned to Palancio. Well, now Briggs has himself a warrant to “arrest” him, requiring all the cops to head down to the docks. In retrospect, this Palancio sequence is supposed to be the death squad’s next hit, which makes one question why Briggs has so very many other guys head in – in truth, it’s for the action sequence. For Palancio isn’t going quietly, rightly fearing for his life as a minor character in a Dirty Harry film, so he goes out all goons blazing.
Harry is on the front lines, for Briggs’ own inscrutable reasons, Davis and Sweet (two of the death squad, remember) joining him. Thus Sweet is instantly killed in the ensuing shootout, saving Harry the trouble in the upcoming climax. And here we are, a police shootout at the docks, like every cop action movie ever made, though here perhaps the original example. I will say, the action quotient in Magnum Force is much increased, which would appeal it to some. And soon enough, Harry is figuring prominently in the stunt-based action, ghost-riding the hood of Palancio’s car like so many Bay Area idiots after him. Here the franchise continues something that really impresses me – it’s always clearly Clint doing the stunts! See below. And soon enough, Palancio is dead.
Harry walks with Early, revealing how the whole Palancio thing (which resulted in like 7 dead, mind you) was all just a setup to kill off Harry; it was Sweet’s bitter sacrifice. Harry is still in danger, and now Early is too. (Quick, who wants to bet Clint’s black partner will survive the movie?) And so, climax coming up, Harry takes the steer by the reins and…goes home. Sure, it’s what I would do, but I’m lazy!
Here Harry receives an offer of employment from the three remaining death-murderers. Subtext becomes text, them all running through the various arguments on vigilantism that came out in the wake of Dirty Harry. Embedded in here is a line that I would be highly suspicious of, had this movie been made in the ‘00s: “Either you’re for us or you’re against us.” Oh my God, Magnum Force is a metaphor for the war in Iraq! Harry turns down his youthful suitors (“I’m afraid you’ve misjudged me.”) and they ride off into the streets for another rewarding day full of pimp murder.
Climax now further primed, Harry takes matters in hand and…checks his mail. Not so fast! There’s a bomb in the mailbox, set to go off when it’s opened. Harry goes upstairs to get his handy diffusion tools, while – Okay, they’ve set it up that Sunny is collecting Harry’s mail for him, meaning she’s now in imminent danger. And this being the sort of movie it is (a death-happy film made in a cynical era), who wants to bet they’ll sacrifice this token love interest just for the feel-bad hell of it? Actually, you’d lose that bet, for the movie is clever enough to have Harry stop Sunny right in the nick of time. (Early, meanwhile, goes to his house and blows up.) Harry collects the disarmed bomb, all while a mustachioed homosexual shriekingly accuses him of mail fraud, the fruit.
Harry, now officially target numero uno, dials up Briggs for aid. If he knows of Briggs’ involvement in the death squad, he does nothing about it. Rather, Briggs collects Harry in his hideous 1970s sedan (Harry driving), then has Harry at gunpoint. Harry’s omnipotent Magnum is hurled out the window into some neighborhood (where it surely has wild adventures of its own), leaving Harry at a severe disadvantage for the finale. Oh well, Briggs is easy enough to lay unconscious, only here come those three motorcycles of doom. And, well, everyone’s driving right now, and they are in San Francisco, the fictional car chase capital of the world – I’m amazed it took this San Francisco set action movie franchise two entries to do the “San Francisco car chase.” And here it is, neither as good as Bullitt or The Rock, but…not bad.
Of course, it all ends up at the docks – not the same docks, mind you, but the salvage yards now. That means there’s an abandoned battleship for Harry to do final battle on. Of course, he has no weapon (except for an American sedan), but he’ll still manage to take out the three Keystone Kops, one by one. It’s not fair to completely ruin the movie and explain just how, except…I didn’t realize jumping into the bay was instantly fatal. And naturally, at some point Harry gets his hands on a motorcycle, allowing for a bunch of show-offy motorcycle jumps. I’m certain Clint wasn’t involved these stunts (but I can’t rule out Steve McQueen).
In the end, to no one’s surprise (but no one’s displeasure), Harry is triumphant in his recent murder of three police officers. Then Briggs comes to, threatens Harry with a gun, and drives off in the sedan of doom with intent to frame Harry for all the death squadery. Ah, but Harry’s planted his mail bomb in Briggs’ backseat (the car), so Briggs explodes. And this is where we end, right before the lengthy, lengthy trial process that will almost surely tide Harry over for the three years until the next entry.
“A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Dilly-dallying plot aside (and ultra-violence aside, depending on taste), Magnum Force is a wholly excellent sequel, certainly far more so than standard expectations would dictate. I’d assume the ‘70s, before the era of the why-the-hell-not sequel (the ‘80s), were concerned enough with little things like art and drama – a sequel wouldn’t come about unless there was a damn good dramatic need for one. In pitting Harry Callahan against a crew of imitative extremists, they found their reason here. And their reward was a generous box office take, decently ahead of Dirty Harry’s – $44 million, to the first’s $35 million. It really isn’t uncommon to see a monetary uptick in the first sequel, especially when it comes anywhere within spitting difference of the original’s quality. Magnum Force is nowhere near Dirty Harry in iconography or classicism, but it is nearly on par quality-wise. So check it out, everybody – a legitimately decent sequel.
Related posts:
• No. 1 Dirty Harry (1971)
• No. 3 The Enforcer (1976)
• No. 4 Sudden Impact (1983)
• No. 5 The Dead Pool (1988)
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