The Dirty Harry Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

This is one of those franchises that probably shouldn't exist because its first film was so obviously built to be a stand-alone film. The story of a cop who becomes so jaded by the institutional rot around him that he kills the bad guy and throws away his badge probably shouldn't have been followed up…

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The Dead Pool

#5 in my ranking of the Dirty Harry franchise. Where Sudden Impact felt like someone inelegantly added Harry Callahan to an unrelated script, The Dead Pool feels like some taking the most generic cop script in existence and changing the generic cop's name to Harry Callahan while still managing to get Clint Eastwood to reprise…

Sudden Impact

#2 in my ranking of the Dirty Harry franchise. #22 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. The first Dirty Harry film where Clint Eastwood has an official directing credit (he did a bit of directing on the first one and is rumored to have shadow-directed the second when Tim Post didn't work fast enough…

The Enforcer

#3 in my ranking of the Dirty Harry franchise. The script for the third outing of Inspector Harry Callahan feels like several scripts smooshed together with just enough connecting tissue conjured up out of thin air to keep the thing afloat for its relatively brief running time. There are ideas about women in the police…

Magnum Force

#4 in my ranking of the Dirty Harry franchise. This movie doesn't feel like it really begins for an hour. Considering that it's the longest of the Dirty Harry movies, that really tells me that Ted Post and his editor Ferris Webster needed to pare down its opening half majorly. Its introduction of the entire…