The Enforcer

Harry's back as The Enforcer.

Continuing with what was promised, today we set our minds in 1976’s The Enforcer, which is also set in San Francisco & starts as a terrorist organization known as “the People's Revolutionary Strike Force” that break into an arms warehouse & steal a load of rocket launchers & various other weapons, homicide cop Frank DiGiorgio (played by John Mitchum) catches them in the act but is shot by the gang. DiGiorgio dies in hospital the next day & his pal Harry Callahan (yes, our man Clint Eastwood) doesn’t like it, very & together with his trusty Magnum 44 sets himself out to bring the People's Revolutionary Strike Force down single handedly if necessary. Things get complicated though when he gets a new rookie female partner Inspector Kate Moore (played by the famous Tyne Daly) and so the People's Revolutionary Strike Force decide to kidnap the mayor (played by John Crawford) and as you might have guessed;  they gang obviously hold him to ransom.

Yes, I'm back.

The third installment of the franchise was directed by James Fargo and lacks some of the elements that made the original flick so popular in 1971, yet is not bad enough to be skipped from your 70’s must watch list. The fairly routine script by Stirling Silliphant & Dean Riesner takes itself pretty seriously & just isn't that good I'm afraid, it's well short on action & set-pieces, the story is dull & turns out to be nothing more than a simple kidnapping & as a whole it never got me going. The bad guys are also underused here, they barely feature at all & after the first few minutes they completely disappear until near the end, the main bad guy Bobby Maxwell has to be one of the weakest on screen baddies ever, he doesn't get any decent lines, he doesn't get much of an opportunity to be evil & he puts up virtually no resistance at the end as Harry blows him away. The one aspect of the film I did like was Harry's partner, I did think The Enforcer was going to turn into a mismatched cop buddy type flick as he is paired up with a woman but it doesn't quite work out that way & while there's mutual respect by the end it never falls into the established clichés. In a way The Enforcer could be described as the very first mismatched partner action movie, but I guess it was worth the try.

Hands up motherfucker!

Harry's got a new partner.

Director Fargo’s job is average enough but the film is pretty bland, a bit lifeless & the action scenes are low key to say the least. There's no car chases, very few shot outs, one fight & little in the way of anything spectacular or particularly memorable including a rushed ending. The Enforcer has a somewhat sedate pace & I just found myself losing interest at various points, the whole film just feels lackluster & like no-one had any enthusiasm apart from Tyne Daly who is pretty good in this a full 6 years before her stint as New York cop Lacey in the famous TV series Cagney & Lacey (which run several seasons from 1982 to 1988)

Technically the film is alright, there's nothing here that stands out as being particularly good or bad although the film itself looks and feels as it if was based only on the idea of earning some extra bucks due to the popularity of part 1 & 2, in fact this third film feels very much as if it was an exploitation film in all its terms if you know what I mean: You have Harry Callahan, and yet he’s the only good element you have in the film. The film was actually shot in San Francisco & on Alcatraz this definitely has a somewhat gritty 70's feel to it. The acting is decent but nothing in the award winning style other flicks do have if we want to compare.

One of the few action scenes.

Harry's wife.

I love this poster.

The Enforcer is an average 70's cop thriller, it doesn't really have enough action for modern audiences’ tastes & the story itself isn't anything to shout about either. It's OK but nothing special. Despite all of that, movie producers made two sequels Sudden Impact (1983) & The Dead Pool (1989) which tried to recover the original impact from the original Dirty Harry movie.

Is The Enforcer worth watching? Yes, definitely as it represents quite well the 70’s vibes many police flicks had in those days, just  don’t expect too much, after all is just a movie.

Here’s the movie trailer: