Oldie Harry

by Odie Henderson May 7, 2008 3:01 PM
After a 20 year absence from the screen, Dirty Harry Callahan is returning for a sixth installment of the franchise that bears his name. Harry was last seen in The Dead Pool, working alongside Liam Neeson as the prime suspect in a rash of murders and Jim Carrey (yes, that Jim Carrey) as a rock star slash victim lip-synching to G'n'R. Harry was already showing his age then, and now at 77, one might find it odd that Clint Eastwood would return to a run-and-shoot kind of role. That is, until one remembers Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey.

Paul Kersey first appeared three years after Dirty Harry in 1974's Death Wish. The movie, based on a novel by Brian Garfield, created the story that would be repeated and sustained through four sequels: Bad guys rape and murder Kersey's wife, daughter, relatives, employees, or neighbors and Kersey becomes a vigilante. The first movie had something interesting to say about vigilantism, but the franchise threw all that out of the window because it took time away from watching Chuck shoot people in the face with enormous guns.

When Death Wish 5: The Crackdown came out, Bronson was 73 and still shooting people without benefit of a wheelchair or a Little Rascal scooter. How I longed to see Bronson, wheelchair-bound and half-senile, aiming his Giganto-Gun at a perp and vaporizing the perp's entire upper body. The kickback would be so powerful, it'd send Chuck's chair flying backwards through a wall. Alas, that never happened, nor did the rumored Death Wish 6 in which the perps, having no more friends of Kersey to mutilate and kill, go after his pets. The climax would have Chuck aiming a Civil War cannon at the main villain, snarling, "This one's for Fluffy!" BLAM!!!!

So if Chuck can kill people at 73, surely his fellow spaghetti Western star can blow them away at 77. (No, Eastwood's latest movie, Gran Turino, is not the Dirty Harry movie.)

Stop reading here if you don't want spoilers. The New York Daily News reports that Eastwood is reviving Harry so he can have him go out in style -- that is, in one hell of a death scene. If I can put in my request, I direct Eastwood to Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle. In that film, the homeboy film critics ask the Dirty Harry clone in the movie they're reviewing "Make my day? Do 50 bullets in yo' ass make yo' day?!" Or even better, have the perp ask what Chuck Bronson asked one killer: "Do you believe in Jesus? Well you're gonna meet him." BLAM!! I love the Dirty Harry movies, so I eagerly await my chance to see him get his day made.

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