Movie · 1973 · Drama, Crime, Action · 2h 4m · R · English
Curator score: 3.2/10 (72.4K ratings)
This time the bullets are hitting pretty close to home.
Overview
"Dirty" Harry Callahan is a San Francisco Police Inspector on the trail of a group of rogue cops who have taken justice into their own hands. When shady characters are murdered one after another in grisly fashion, only Dirty Harry can stop them.
Ratings
Curator score: 3.2/10
IMDb: 7.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 69%
Metacritic: 58
TMDB: 7.1/10
Director
Ted Post
Production
Warner Bros. Pictures, Malpaso Productions
Cast
Clint Eastwood, Hal Holbrook, Mitchell Ryan, David Soul, Felton Perry, Robert Urich, Kip Niven, Tim Matheson, Christine White, Adele Yoshioka, Richard Devon, Tony Giorgio, Albert Popwell, John Mitchum, Margaret Avery, Jack Kosslyn, Clifford A. Pellow, Maurice Argent, Suzanne Somers, Karna Small
Curator Review
Verdict
A gritty, politically thorny 70s cop sequel with strong action set pieces and a sharper focus on rogue justice than its predecessor, but it’s also uneven, more didactic, and less stylishly directed than the original. Worth it if you want a tense crime thriller with a reactionary edge and a fascinating view of 1970s American policing on screen.
Best for
fans of 1970s crime thrillers
viewers interested in vigilante-police morality plays
people who like hard-edged action with procedural elements
Clint Eastwood completists
fans of cynical, urban genre cinema
Skip if
you want a purely neutral or progressive take on law enforcement
you dislike morally ugly protagonists
you need a tightly paced thriller with no digressions
you’re looking for the most iconic entry in the series
Overview
Magnum Force is less a clean sequel than a rebuttal to the controversy around Dirty Harry. It keeps the swagger, the gun fetish, and the urban paranoia, but shifts the target to a squad of cops who’ve decided they’re judge, jury, and executioner. That gives the film a built-in tension: it wants to condemn extrajudicial violence while still thrilling to it.
Worth noting
The result is messy but interesting. Ted Post’s direction is functional rather than electric, yet the movie still delivers grimy 70s atmosphere, solid suspense, and a few memorably nasty action beats. Clint Eastwood is a little less monstrous here, which makes the character easier to root for but also blunts some of the original’s moral discomfort.
Bottom line
What lingers is the contradiction. The film is both an apology and an escalation, a studio crime picture that keeps asking whether violent justice can ever be justified while clearly enjoying the spectacle of it. That tension is the main reason to watch it now.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Josh Lewis (3★) · 405 likes
hmmm perfectly competent and the violence is still really gross and effective but post is no siegel and the reversal of the original film here where harry is now hunting down cops with the gall to take the law into their gruesome, extrajudicial hands makes the whole thing feel like a weird, back-handed apology for the moral queasiness and complexity of the first film (and kinda neuters the depiction of harry as just as much of a violent psycho as… more hmmm perfectly competent and the violence is still really gross and effective but post is no siegel and the reversal of the original film here where harry is now hunting down cops with the gall to take the law into their gruesome, extrajudicial hands makes the whole thing feel like a weird, back-handed apology for the moral queasiness and complexity of the first film (and kinda neuters the depiction of harry as just as much of a violent psycho as… more
Will Menaker (3.5★) · 321 likes
Written by John Milius and Michael Cimino? Opening credits just a gun pointed at the viewer over funky 70s music? A grisly fantasy of a right wing death squad meting out death to criminal scum? Did I love it? Yes to all of the above.
theriverjordan (3★) · 196 likes
“Magnum Force” is a mea culpa of a movie. It seeks atonement, while still sticking a pistol in your face.
After accusations of fascist overtones in “Dirty Harry,” Clint Eastwood returned to the part of the trigger-happy cop for a sequel of redemption. Sure, Harry is a vigilante. But… he’s not the worst of the vigilantes.
Original “Dirty” director Don Siegel refused to take part in a follow-up entry. After Eastwood turned down helming the film himself, Ted Post stepped… more
Matt Gourley · 168 likes
As I reluctantly near the end of my paternity leave, and subsequently my days watching all kinds of movies with my newborn daughter in my arms, I ask her, Nell dear, how shall we close this out? And with every film in God’s Blockbuster at her disposal, she looks at me and utters her first words: ‘Dirty Harry series, Dad.’
So here we go.
And for some reason we started with the second one. That’s newborns for ya.
sydney (3.5★) · 164 likes
somehow i forgot all about the emotional rollercoaster 1970's crime movies are, they're so hilarious but so fucking sick, like how do you make a movie with this cute little stunt where harry pretends to be a pilot and then brutally murder a prostitute and then go right back to the cute stuff without going insane? i mean the creators must be equally emotionally distant from each event, what does that say about the final product? anyway, maybe this plays… more somehow i forgot all about the emotional rollercoaster 1970's crime movies are, they're so hilarious but so fucking sick, like how do you make a movie with this cute little stunt where harry pretends to be a pilot and then brutally murder a prostitute and then go right back to the cute stuff without going insane? i mean the creators must be equally emotionally distant from each event, what does that say about the final product? anyway, maybe this plays… more