The fourth Dirty Harry, the first directed by Eastwood himself, and also the one that brought us the famous line ‘Go ahead, make my day’. It is spoken twice in the movie, the first time during an amusing, if somewhat typical scene with Harry singlehandedly (but with the help of his magnum, of course) ending a robbery.
After having enraged his superiors once more, Harry is put on a case of a series of mysterious murders, apparently sex-related, since all the victims are shot both through the head (where their brains should be) and their balls (where their brains are). The killer is – no surprise – a young woman (Sondra Locke), who’s exacting revenge for a gang rape in which she and her younger sister were victims. Sudden Impact seems more or less an answer to the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force. In that movie Harry was confronted with a group of vigilante cops, who were executing the kind of villains who managed to circumvent the law, but he ended up confronting (and eliminating) them. In Sudden Impact the opposite position is taken, in a rather radical way.
Of all Dirty Harry films Sudden Impact is closest to a spaghetti western : it is a typical revenge movie, even respecting the flashback structure and the de-saturated, heavily filtered look of the flashbacks. The problem of Sudden Impact is that the two story-lines (Locke exacting revenge and Clint investigating the case) aren’t really intertwined. For about an hour or so you have the impression that Harry is a little lost in his own movie: for an investigator he’s not investigating much, the usual conflicts with his superiors have become way too predictable by now, and the comic relief of the farting and pissing dog is downright embarrassing.
It’s only when it becomes clear that police chief Pat Hingle (reliable as ever) is hiding something, that Eastwood the director gets his film on track. The revenge story may be a bit too crude to make a real statement about vigilantism, but is otherwise well-handled, and when the story-lines finally intertwine, we’re in for a compelling and spectacular final half hour. While not being particularly impressive, Locke turns in one of her better performances here.
