When you think of “Dirty Harry,” you most likely think of the seminal 1971 action thriller and not of the four official “Dirty Harry” films that came in its wake (five if you count 2008’s “Gran Torino”). The original film remains one of the best action movies, and arguably best films, of the 20th Century, somehow appealing to our base appetite for all-out action while also presenting a nuanced portrayal of its problematic protagonist. Is Harry Callahan merely a walking advertisement for the efficacy of police brutality, or someone hampered in his pursuit of justice by a society that cares more about bureaucracy than actually catching the bad guy? It’s not entirely clear in Don Siegel’s film, which is part of the reason why it endures to this day.
But for better or worse, Eastwood did make a heck of a lot of follow-ups to “Dirty Harry” — a controversial film upon its debut — and most of them weren’t very good. Barring 1976’s “The Enforcer,” every subsequent “Dirty Harry” installment had major issues, and the final official film, 1988’s “The Dead Pool,” ended things on an anti-climactic note for what remains one of Eastwood’s best-known and most influential characters.
But Harry Callahan would live on even after he’d been sapped of all his cinematic energy. Two years after “The Dead Pool,” he would return in 8-bit form for the NES “Dirty Harry” game, in which the titular cop hunted down a drug kingpin in his native San Francisco. The side-scroller featured Harry’s signature Smith & Wesson Model 29 handgun and saw the digital Eastwood deliver his famous “Go ahead, make my day” and “Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” lines. Lamentably, the game wasn’t much better than the ill-conceived “Dirty Harry” sequels, and so Eastwood’s rogue cop saw a similarly ignoble end to his video game career.
But in 2006, Dirty Harry was given another chance to prove his worth as a video game protagonist with a third person shooter that never actually came to fruition.