The Dead Pool

I find that I like writing movie reviews, so I am writing one.  I remember a writing assignment from 37 years ago, when I was at Berkeley, to write a movie review.  I hated it, had no idea what to do.  Things change.

The Dead Pool is a Dirty Harry movie, made in 1988.  My guess is that this movie represents the end of the franchise, or maybe it brought about the end of the franchise.

The quick summation of the movie is that it's not much, about the equivalent of an hour-and-a-half version of Mannix.  Actually, I don't remember Mannix all that well, but choose some old police/detective TV show, and you have the idea.

The good parts:  Liam Neeson is in it, and Clint Eastwood blows away several bad guys.  You have to suspend your disbelif a bit, because he seems to have an easy time dispatching bad guys with automatice weapons, while he just has the world's biggest hand gun, but that's what Dirty Harry does.

Speaking of suspended disbelief, there is this one scene.  Okay, some times you just have to go along with the movie -- how did the lights stay on on Titanic with all that water; could Saruman really make that many Uruk-hai; that Death Star doesn't look fully operational -- but there is one scene in this movie that makes it really tough.  Harry and his partner get chased through San Francisco by a bomb-laden toy car, about a foot long or so.  The chase goes on a long ways, at freeway speeds, with Harry's car and the toy car flying over San Francisco's famous hills, and the toy car keeps up, never flipping over or lagging behind.  And who is controlling this car?  A guy is driving behind it, also keeping up, and somehow managing to control his car and the amazing toy car.  The toy car even catches up and blows up Harry's car, but Harry survives (Dirty Harry doesn't die in his films.)

Speaking of suspended disbelief, again, Patricia Clarkson is in this movie, and I think at one point she said something about being Miss Colorado runner-up one year, maybe.  No offense, but pickings must have been pretty slim in Colorado that year.  Okay, that was obviously offensive, and I'm not even sure she said that, but, umm...

Adding insult to injury, as I was watching this boring thriller, I was thinking that at least I get to hear that famous Dirty Harry line, "Go ahead, make my day" before it's over.  That would be a high point at least.  Oops, wrong movie.  Maybe that was Magnum Force.  Kind of a letdown.