Film Friday: The Dead Pool (1988)

The Dead Pool is the last Dirty Harry movie. As cop movies go, this one is ok, but as Dirty Harry films go, this one stinks. Believe it or not, the reason is political. By the time The Dead Pool was made, there just wasn’t that much left for conservatives to complain about in the criminal justice system. And that left this film rudderless.

The Plot

The Dead Pool begins with Det. Harry Callahan, aka “Dirty Harry” (Clint Eastwood), being attacked by men working for a mobster Harry put in prison. Harry survives. He is then assigned to investigate the death of rock singer Johnny Square (Jim Carrey). Harry learns that the director of Johnny’s music video, Peter Swan (Liam Neeson), had put Johnny’s name into a dead pool – a game in which each participant picks celebrities who they think will die and the winner is the person with the most dead celebrities by the end of the game. Swan’s list also included other celebrities who had recently been killed, and it included Harry’s name.

As Harry investigates the case, he destroys a news camera when the news crew gets in the way of his investigation. To get the news crew not to sue the city, Harry is ordered to agree to a dinner/interview with reporter Samantha Walker (Patricia Clarkson). Low intensity sparks fly and she and Harry begin to fall for each other. After another attack from the mobster, she comes to see that the media does sensationalize crime and she learns she doesn’t like it very much when the cameras are turned on her.

Where This Film Goes Wrong

It’s hard not to like a Dirty Harry film. Not only does Eastwood have a great screen presence, and these films tend to be very well written, but Harry’s an iconic conservative hero. Indeed, Dirty Harry is an attack on the liberalism that infested the criminal justice system in the 1960s, which elevated the protection of the guilty above the protection of the public. Dirty Harry also slammed politicians who were more concerned with image than with actually protecting the public. This was a welcome message in an age when society seemed to be falling apart and when liberals kept telling us there was nothing anyone could do about it.

The sequel, Magnum Force upheld the idea of rule of law, which is a rare message in cop films, which usually are closer to revenge fantasies than anything else. The Enforcer went after politicians who tried to make politically correct policies without regard for who got hurt, and it even added a nice little message of judging people on their own merits rather than their identity groups. . . very conservative.

Sudden Impact is where things started to go wrong. This film really was just a revenge film. What’s worse, Harry was nothing more than a passenger in the revenge plot and his role in the film was just to bail out the vigilante.

Then along came The Dead Pool. In some ways, The Dead Pool was an attempt to go back to the original Dirty Harry formula of attacking some bit of leftism that was causing society problems. Unfortunately, the target they chose wasn’t really a good one, and the reason was that the things Dirty Harry attacked had all pretty much been removed from the criminal justice system by 1988. Indeed, by the time this film was made, many of the Supreme Court’s most egregious decisions from the 1960s had been overturned and obviously guilty criminals weren’t getting off on technicalities anymore. Moreover, police officers had come to be seen as heroes by most parts of society. Thus, nothing of which Harry complained in the past was an issue anymore.

So what liberalism does The Dead Pool attack? First, it starts by giving Harry an Asian partner. This harkens back to him being assigned an Hispanic partner in Dirty Harry and a seemingly unqualified female partner in The Enforcer. Both films made the point that liberals are assigning people by race or gender rather than ability. But here, no such message is given. There is no suggestion Harry’s partner is a political statement meant to benefit liberal ideology over rationality.

Secondly, the main thrust of this film is Harry’s relationship with the media, which is where this film goes wrong. In the prior films, Harry criticized something directly related to his profession. He criticized a legal system that let obviously guilty people go free for meaningless procedural mistakes. He criticized people who suggested that the cops should act like death squads. He criticized politicians who didn’t care about how many people were hurt so long as their own careers were protected or their own ideologies could be implemented. These were things which really bothered people because these things flew in the face of common sense, they exploited the public for personal reasons, and they got people hurt. That made those films resonate with people.

This time, it’s different. The message here is that the media is evil for sensationalizing crime. But this is problematic. For one thing, these reporters aren’t nearly as bad as other reporters shown on film. Indeed, it’s hard to see these reporters as particularly bad at all. So essentially, the film criticizes the existence of the press, which is an awkward message at best. For another, this isn’t something which affects the public. In other words, it may stink for Harry or the people who draw the media’s interest, but it doesn’t hurt the rest of us, not like a system that turns killers free. Thus, it’s hard for the audience to sympathize or feel this film applies to them in any direct way. An attempt is made in the film to argue that it does matter to everyone by showing a man who tries to set himself on fire to get media attention, i.e. the media causes us problems by encouraging these people, but even that doesn’t really affect us as he would only end up killing himself.

Then the message gets muddled because Harry and the reporter quickly fall for each other and they both agree that the other is right. Huh? Could you imagine Harry and Mrs. Gray from the personnel board in The Enforcer deciding that the other was right? Hardly. When Harry decides that journalists are just doing their job, he literally wipes out the entire point to the film. It’s like they couldn’t really find an issue for Harry to object to, so they came up with this one, but then weren’t sure they really believed it. And when Walker then says that Harry is right and that she now sees how bad journalists are, she converts her entire side into a straw-man argument, i.e. something that was created only so Harry could knock it down. Both of these points seriously undermine the film’s message and leave the film as little more than a cop film.

And as a cop film, The Dead Pool is an ok. . . not great. It’s got a decent if unsurprising mystery (prior Dirty Harry films were not mysteries), it’s got some action here and there, and it’s competently shot, though it’s not a very beautiful or creative film. Unfortunately, Eastwood seems to be on autopilot in the role and Harry largely spends the movie walking around acting like a grumpy tough guy/caricature of himself. The film also succumbs to big-gun = small-penis syndrome when Harry uses a harpoon cannon to finish off the villain. I guess the .44 Magnum just wasn’t big enough anymore. Still, as cop films go, this one was ok. It probably wasn’t as good as The Presidio or Black Rain, and it certainly wasn’t Die Hard, but it was better than Red Heat.

But unfortunately, this wasn’t just a cop film, it was also a Dirty Harry film. And as a Dirty Harry film, this one is truly disappointing. It lacks the bite of the other films. It lacks the sense of right and wrong. It lacks the sense of us the common people versus them the nutty elites. In essence, this is a cop movie staring a Dirty Harry caricature, not a Dirty Harry film.