'MAGNUM FORCE'..........THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY.......

Magnum Force (1973)  "Their minds are dead....."

              In a movie jam packed with quotable lines ("A man's got to know his limitations"), that nasty little one-liner still sticks in our head more than all the others.....(Sometimes we feel like using it when we see the MAGA redhats at Trump's rallies....)

                It's spoken at the very start of the film by thuggish labor kingpin Ricca (Richard Devon) who's just skated out of the court system, wrongly exonerated for executing his rival, along with his victim's entire family. Ricca and his entourage are so slimy, even his high priced lawyer has bad dental work.

                Ricca and gang get promptly point-blank perforated by an unidentified motorcycle cop who stops them for a minor traffic violation, thereby circumventing the paperwork of writing out a ticket.

                 And here's where you know that the two young up-and-screenwriters, John Milius and Michael Cimino will brilliantly rock the rough-justice world of Clint Eastwood's San Francisco homicide Inspector, 'Dirty' Harry Callahan.

                  Turning the tables on Harry, who treats criminals' rights as more of a guideline than a rule,  Milius and Cimino pit him against a cadre of vigilante cops who've taken Harry's attitude to the ultimate extreme.......efficiently serving as judge, jury and executioners to the town's most prominent slimeballs.

                  And they're expansive and inclusive in their choice of victims.......everyone from coke-sniffing penthouse crime lords to the neighborhood pimp who pours drano down the throat of a whore holding out on him. (This movie spews out a non-stop festival of death throes......lingering shots of twitching bodies as numerous folks gasp out their last breath....)

                Eastwood's Harry  normally loves mowing down miscreants with his cannon-sized .44 Magnum,  especially those who have the audacity to interrupt his lunch breaks, But our scripting team, soon to carve out their own major careers as writer-directors, clearly stun and perplex Harry with this collection of scary self-possessed, fresh-faced stormtroopers........putting Dirty Harry in the bizarre unlikely position of defending the judicial system that he himself has little use for.

                That's why this particular Harry movie stands out for us more than any of the others.....the way the controversial politics of Don Siegel's stylish introductory film get flipped upside down and backwards.......depicting a nightmarish new world in which justice and morality become strictly in the eye of the beholder.  In that regard, when watching it today, the film seems creepily ahead of its time......

               Forced to restore a semblance of law and order by wiping out the rogue cops, Dirty Harry as much an anybody else in the movie, learns a surprising lesson in knowing his limitations.  4 gory, twitching stars (****).....a magnum opus for an unsettled age.