Clint Eastwood turned 52 in 1982, but, as far as American moviegoers were concerned, he’d only been a movie star for 15 years (which is when all three chapters of the “Dollars Trilogy” were theatrically released in the United States). And though his “Dirty Harry” movies were viewed as politically conservative, he was still largely viewed as a revolutionary figure in film. His Westerns were revisionist and, for the time, incredibly violent; his cop flicks were unapologetically R-rated and, with “Every Which Way But Loose” and “Any Which Way You Can,” he had every kid in the country wishing they could have a beer-swilling, bird-flipping orangutan as their best friend.
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Throughout his career, Clint Eastwood has taken note of what kinds of movies are connecting with viewers and sought to place his own personal spin on them. He responded to the buddy-cop phenomenon of the 1980s with the the big-budget quasi-spoof “The Rookie” (one of his worst movies), mused on the glut of World War II movies with the richly textured duo of “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” and, at the age of 94, worked a sneakily subversive riff on the legal thriller with “Juror #2.” He isn’t out to show his peers how it’s done à la Steven Spielberg or James Cameron. He just wants to show how Clint does it. And that’s often more than good enough for moviegoers.
So when Eastwood noticed Hollywood had been knocking out blockbusters loaded with groundbreaking visual FX after the watershed event that was “Star Wars,” he moved forward on a pricey spy thriller with a bluescreen-enabled optical spectacle that, in its way, presaged the box office success of “Top Gun.”
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