Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

"It's the eighties: Do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan." Hate to start things off with an MST3k quote, but after listening to Richard Schickel's commentary track for the fourth SUDDEN IMPACT, I needed a laugh.

There is one particularly interesting bit of trivia he provides early on, though. SUDDEN IMPACT was born on the backs of a marketing survey administered by Warner Bros. which asked people which iconic character and the actor who played him they most wanted to see. Sean Connery as James Bond was on the list, but in the end, Clint Eastwood as Inspector Harry Callahan got the majority rule. Funny thing is that this didn't stop Never Say Never Again from being made, but Eastwood returned, with his slow-burning stare and .44 Magnum, updated to become the .44 Magnum Automag, to herald the era of the Gipper, who was quite the fan of this new Dirty Harry escapade. Conservative time again.

Eastwood and the studio had a mutual relationship, with the studio providing Eastwood the chance to gamble on the likes of Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man just so long as Clint delivered a hit. So Eastwood took matters into his own hands by starring in and directing SUDDEN IMPACT. Now having previously read George Chabot's review, I disagree with the notion that Eastwood as an actor needed to take a cue from David Soul and Tim Matheson because his chops weren't on the level for the original Dirty Harry. I rewatch that film because Eastwood had the character of Harry Callahan down lock, stock and one smoking Magnum. There was more subtlety and personality in the original performance, but I found Eastwood's boredom with Callahan evident from The Enforcer onwards. Here is a man of restless potential, who had showed promise as a filmmaker in his directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, before doing a more efficient job with The Outlaw Josey Wales. And yet, despite flashes of energy, Eastwood was bound to once in a while do a formula Dirty Harry flick. I mean, you've got to give the people what they want.

There's little surprise left in SUDDEN IMPACT, a compendium of all three previous films which throws in an avenging angel rape victim subplot that places it on the level of I Spit on Your Grave or Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45, which needs a decent Region 1 DVD release like I need to update some of my old reviews. Eastwood goes through the motions in a first hour which basically finds him swatting hornet's nests wherever he goes and getting chewed out by his captain. Amusing as I may find it, a cliché is still a cliché, and SUDDEN IMPACT adheres to it like a memo.

And then the movie introduces us to Jennifer (Sondra Locke), a bland blonde traumatized by a gang rape (which also involved her now-catatonic younger sister) under the boardwalk of a carnival some ten years earlier. When she's not psychologically unleashing her demons Pollock-style via paintings, she stalks the perpetrators and methodically shoots them twice: once in the head, and once in the other head. Just like the fascist cops in Magnum Force, Harry's ideological crime-solving methods spill over onto Jennifer, who by film's end offers the last of a consistently dunderheaded literalization of the inadequacies of the modern justice system that is meant to remind audiences why they like Harry Callahan in the first place, just in case they forgot.

It's a matter of mistrust, of the same old song and dance only prolonged for over a decade until your whole body feels so heavy and lifeless, you feel like you could sink into the earth's core. Once again, Harry finds himself unwittingly foiling a restaurant robbery during an admittedly smile-inducing showdown during which Eastwood gets to fire off some of the better throwaway lines in the script, the kind that makes Dirty Harry seem so irredeemably cool. It's the time once again where another young black man is staring down the barrel of his Magnum, and just one line this time is all it takes for Harry to taunt his prey into surrender: "Go ahead, make my day." This is after he runs afoul of three preppy punks let off on a technicality for who-the-f***-knows, and before he pays a visit to a lecherous mobster during his granddaughter's birthday to coax the carbon copy Corleone into a heart attack.

When both groups strike back, it's time for Callahan to go on a reluctant vacation on the orders of his Captain Briggs. Now I know what you're thinking: "Briggs? I thought Harry killed that guy in Magnum Force. How did they coax Hal Holbrook into reprising his role?" That's what I thought at least, until I recognized Bradford Dillman in what is essentially the same role he played as Captain McKay in The Enforcer, only the screenwriter, Joseph Stinson, felt names were inconsequential and interchangeable. So that's why there's a whole new character named Briggs in this film.

So Harry takes time away from San Francisco and, in true Harry fashion, follows up on the case of the castrated corpses down to San Paulo in good old Irvine. And would fate not be a cruel b*tch if Harry didn't get stopped before his destination by yet another bank robbery, during which he commandeers a retirement home bus in order to chase the motorcycle-riding criminal? When Harry finally gets him at point blank range, this is when we see Jennifer first setting her unflinching eyes on her soon-to-be-savior.

It wouldn't be a Dirty Harry movie without Albert Popwell playing an antagonist, but here's the kicker: he creeps up behind Harry looking like a hired hand with a shotgun only to have Harry turn around, gun pointed at the right angle with which he could blow his head clean off, but Harry lets his defenses down. Popwell finally gets to play one of Harry's allies, Horace, but if you've seen any of the previous Dirty Harry films, you know that spells certain doom. Shame they didn't inject his death with the same type of winking humor they used in that scene. Consistency counts.

And so yeah, the real villains of the piece are once again a bunch of unexceptional deviants who have neither the personality or the grand menace of Andy Robinson or even David Soul. I suppose the one female of the bunch, Ray (Audrie Neenan), is a dyke, but she tries to come on to the head sleazebag, Mick (Paul Drake), who has yet to meet a woman whose face he didn't want to tenderize with his gentle hands. It seems they've got the upper hand on Jennifer, but they made the stupid mistake of both killing Horace and crippling Meathead, the flatulent, ugly bulldog Horace gave to Harry as a gift with a cute little pink bow.

Now I'll give SUDDEN IMPACT credit: the movie's wit seemed to make me actually laugh more so than almost anything in The Enforcer, except for the dog, who makes Clyde the orangutan look Dorothy's Toto. When Eastwood demonstrates his .44 Automag in front of shotgun-toting Horace in a friendly display of one-upping sportsmanship, he takes a cue from Horace's braggadocio:

"You've got to strain the remains for the fingerprints."
"Well, this is the .44 Magnum Auto-Mag, and it holds a 300-grain cartridge. And, if properly used, it can remove the fingerprints."

Eastwood as the older, cattier Callahan makes SUDDEN IMPACT seem all the more fun than the movie really is. It was a bold idea to tackle the notion of a rape victim seeking revenge in a popcorn action flick, but let me just say this as plainly as I can: Sondra Locke is no Jodie Foster, no Rosario Dawson and probably not even on the level of Camille Keaton. Although romantically linked to Clint Eastwood, their scenes together lack any chemistry, and when she's by herself toting the gun, she looks more robotic and sounds more bored than Eastwood, whose Harry Callahan seems to take on Terminator-like levels of brutality but survive every time. There's just something about Locke that just feels too detachable, and even in the flashback scenes to her naïve youth, she seems to have this ramrod stiffness that left me cold. And having her lecture Harry about justice is probably not the best way to fashion a denouement. The only thing I can recommend about her performance is her eyes, and that is just not enough.

Mobsters chasing after Callahan is an idea that would be borrowed in The Dead Pool, a much leaner and underrated swan song that, in retrospect, seems to be more challenging than this film. Character actor Pat Hingle turns up in the Hal Holbrook role as the uptight chief of police in San Paulo whose gruffness hides a shameful ulterior motive relating the Jennifer's plight. The action sequences are surely more energetic and abundant than in The Enforcer, but the self-aware familiarity of these scenes clash with the heady topicality of the Jennifer Spencer situation.

SUDDEN IMPACT may have been the only Dirty Harry movie in which Clint Eastwood had a more active role behind the camera, and he even brought back the DP from the original Dirty Harry, Bruce Surtees, as well as composer Lalo Schifrin, who sat out The Enforcer. But the truth is that anyone could have made this movie. And such an unfortunate observation means that this 1983 effort is exactly the type of cynical studio effort audiences apparently wanted, and just par for the course in regards to Clint's own contract.

Presented once again in 2.35:1 widescreen, the anamorphically-enhanced new digital transfer provides another solid if considerably troublesome upgrade. Grain and print defects seem natural by this point, so I won't trouble you with these particulars, which do not get in the way of overall quality. Increased sharpness is also a welcome benefit of this new transfer, especially given the wide shots afforded by the Cinemascope-friendly aspect ratio. Blackness levels, however, are more erratic than I expected, as are the levels of color saturation. The predominant night shots often seem too deep, and belie the film's age in a rather negative way. Although shadow detail and backlighting pose no problems, when darkness falls, some detail is crushed by the heavy darks. The colors tend to overcompensate by being a tad too bright and vivid, which surely gives the film a glitzier look than a grittier one. Still, there are some really strong instances when these two particular elements seem natural and beneficial rather than intrusive and artificial. The opening scene in particular looks just as steely and crisp as the scene in the original film where Anne Mary Deacon's body is pulled from the earthy grave.

There's a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix in English, plus a 2.0 Spanish mix and monaural Portuguese, Japanese and French dubs (with optional subtitles in all five languages, natch). Whereas the film was originally mixed in stereo for the theatrical release, as opposed to mono, once again we get a pretty strong, broad-stretching surround experience that uses the rear channels and subwoofer to particularly good effect. The sound editing in all of these films affords for the chance to get some really strong, punchy effects during action sequences that are given spacious imaging to graciously immersive results. Lalo Schifrin's score is full-bodied and a welcome improvement over Jerry Fielding's work in The Enforcer, but I consider the then-modern horns and samples not as effectively ominous as the sinister jazz of Don Siegel's original film.

SUDDEN IMPACT features the least of the various extras scattered throughout these "Deluxe Edition" reissues, sadly. Without a vintage promotional short, which would've likely evolved around this time to mere junket interviews, all we've got is another audio commentary and another featurette, and they are both fairly weak. Richard Schickel returns to do audio commentary after tackling the original Dirty Harry, but I found him nearly insufferable the last time around. Nothing's changed here: he's still rambling without any real revelatory analysis save for that bit of marketing strategy trivia, and if I invoked MST3k before in a gimmicky manner, it's likely because Schickel's monotonous attempt at active participation with the film he's watching made me pine for an episode of that TV series (I, myself, turned into Joel Hodgson several times during this commentary). Schickel is curiously unanalytical: His one attempt at "mild criticism" involves the dueling narrative, and although he provides notes on cast and crew, it's too much cheerleading than what I could bear, citing Eastwood's direction as "a step up in class" and sheepishly calling the Meathead character a "Dirty Harry-type dog."

Setting aside the trailer gallery, the only other extra is "The Evolution of Clint Eastwood" (25:39), which whittles down the "Out of the Shadows" documentary, appended to disc two of the Dirty Harry special edition, into another star-studded talk piece (Shane Black, Hal Holbrook, Paul Haggis, etc. etc.) that is curiously less fulfilling than any of the previous discussions about violence in cinema or the politics of Harry Callahan. It skips through the 1950s and 1960s in just three minutes before once again worshipping the original Dirty Harry. The 1970s are virtually limited to that one moment, but in moving on to the 1980s, we get a flaccid discussion limited only to SUDDEN IMPACT. Imagine a hagiographic, witless episode of VH1's "I Love the 1980s," where Eastwood's filmography is defended as unimpeachable, despite probable arguments to the contrary in the form of Warner-distributed stinkers such as City Heat, Pink Cadillac and The Rookie. Black deserves points for a thoughtful discussion of Unforgiven as tricky in that "it pretends to be anti-Western," and both A Perfect World and The Bridges of Madison County are evoked until we finally reach the new millennium with Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby. By that time, however, all this fawning had me yawning.

Movie grade: 2 stars
Video grade: 4 stars.
Audio grade: 4.5 stars.
Extras grade: 2.5 stars.
Final grade: 2 stars. Following the bland The Enforcer, SUDDEN IMPACT turns Dirty Harry Callahan into a reluctant camp icon, thus short-changing the series that began so strongly and really had nowhere to go but down ever since. Eastwood stars and directs, but he is merely serviceable, and despite the notion of a female avenger who could cause Harry a business dilemma, there's no surprise or invention to back that up. I suppose that if you like the formula, you'd find yourself giving this a higher grade than I would. But I just recently watched 48 Hours and found myself in the company of a much better, livelier movie than this. The dull extras aren't enough to warrant an upgrade to fans, so unless you crave a new digital transfer, alongside the same Dolby Digital 5.1 track, you know the way to make your day.

SEE ALSO OTHER DIRTY HARRY REVIEWS:
Dirty Harry
Magnum Force
The Enforcer
The Dead Pool

SUDDEN IMPACT is a Warner Bros. Pictures presentation, rated R for strong violence, language, nudity, and sexual content including acts of rape. It runs 117 minutes and started its theatrical run on December 9, 1983.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age