Review of Magnum Force (1973) by Aaron C — 02 Sep 2008

How quickly a franchise can turn sour. Here Ted Post provides workmanlike direction as Cimino and Milius labour hard to prove their ambiguous and not-so-fascist credentials. Whereas Dirty Harry maintained so many shades of grey you could lose yourself in the moral blur, this sequel suddenly creates a "good cop, bad cop" dichotomy that places violent police rule-breaker Callahan (Eastwood) against better organised and more coherent violent police rule-breakers, killing underworld figures one by one.

Damned if I know the moral difference, and damned if I care, because the political to and fro of the early sequences is not sustained by any tension and the action setpieces of the second half are so pedestrian that it's hard to spark much interest.

Crucially, the central theme of Don Siegel's remarkable original was how to resolve the contradictory liberal impulses of justice and procedural fairness when confronted with sociopathy. The sequel dispenses with that dilemma by positing a new one--how much down the slippery slope is too far.

When it's a matter of degrees and the screenwriters don't have any empathy for the fundamental contradictions being explored, the result is bland, by-the-numbers action cinema without any nuance.