The Dead Pool

Over the past few months, I watched all the Dirty Harry sequels. I decided to review one of them. I hope you have time to read this review in between your repeated viewings of 300. Dirty Harry is no Spartan, but he has a big gun.

Warning: Spoilers. This movie came out in 1988 so of course there are spoilers.

The fifth and final Dirty Harry film is called The Dead Pool. When I first saw the title, I thought the movie was going to have something to do with a bunch of bodies found in a swimming pool (that's a different Dirty Harry sequel), or a climatic fight/chase scene in a pool hall. This is not the case. The Dead Pool is actually a betting pool. Players place bets on what celebrity will die next. That’s pretty cool. There was an episode of CSI: Miami that ripped off this plot. The betting took place off-shore, on a really nice yacht. Don’t get me started on CSI: Miami and Horatio (known simply as H to us fans). The dead pool in the Dirty Harry movie doesn’t take place on a yacht, it takes place on a film set for a movie called Hotel Satan. When I saw the title of that movie, I realized that that was what I really wanted to be watching. Fucking Hotel Satan. I want one of the jackets worn by the film crew members.

Okay…back to the review. The movie (The Dead Pool) begins with a crazy-ass Satanist (played by Jim Carrey) singing along to GnFnR’s Welcome To The Jungle. A woman is tied to the bed in preparation for some sort of satanic ritual/sacrifice. Scary stuff. I wish the bad guys in action movies were still Satanists and bikers (for kickass biker bad guys, check out Stone Cold and Cobra). It turns out that this frightening opening sequence is really just a scene being shot for the movie Hotel Satan. Jim Carrey is a drug-addicted musician-turned-actor named Johnny Squares (some sort of play on Johnny Rotten, I think). The director of this amazing film is Peter Swan, played by Liam Neeson with a pre-Star Wars Jedi pony-tail. When Johnny Squares retreats to his trailer to do some drugs between set breaks, a killer sneaks in and murders him. It turns out Johnny’s name was in the dead pool. Peter Swan and his crew are involved in betting on the dead pool.

At the other beginning of the movie, Dirty Harry has just apprehended Lou Janero—a mob boss. Some members of the mob are pissed off about this and try to take Harry out one night after he gets off work. Harry was probably pretty tired and wanted to get home to kick back on the couch and watch some TV. No such luck. Two cars follow Harry into an alley and cut him off, causing his car to crash and flip on its side. A bunch of crazy goons jump out of their cars and start firing Uzis. Harry calmly dispatches all of them with single shots from his .44 magnum. Why do bad guys in 80’s action films always have Uzis? I think Uzis and cocaine go together nicely. What Harry doesn’t realize is that his name is also in the dead pool. This becomes somewhat important later on when he thinks Janero’s mob buddies are still trying to kill him and it turns out it’s the dead pool killer guy. Harry confronts Janero in prison and threatens him to call back his mob goons or this big, buffed, inmate pal of his will introduce Janero to Dirty Sanchez (I made some of that up). I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Harry’s partner this time around is a Chinese-American karate expert. His skills come in handy during an action sequence that takes place at a Chinese Restaurant. For some inane reason, a bunch of machinegun-toting assholes decide to hold up this restaurant. This place must make lots of money, given these guys’ effort in obtaining it. Harry sees them enter, sneaks in, and sits at a table. When the assholes start screaming their demands, Harry calmly cracks open a fortune cookie and reads the bad guy leader his fortune—“You’re shit out of luck.” Bullets start flying. One of the bad guys gets shot and ends up crashing through the aquarium that you find in all fine Chinese restaurants. Meanwhile, Harry’s partner is outside, demonstrating his karate know-how to onlookers as he kicks the gonads off of another thug (I took some literary license here). This scene was utter shit. It has nothing to do with the mob/dead pool killer plot. The movie gets worse from here.

So…many more people are murdered. Harry finds out about the dead pool connection to Swan and his film crew. It turns out that the people on the list are being killed in re-enactments of scenes from Swan’s movies. It must be Swan committing the murders, right? Not so quick there, pal. I’m not going to tell you who the killer is (hint: the killer is a disgruntled, obsessed, former employee of Swan).

There is a scene where the killer uses a remote control car, armed with a bomb, to kill one of his victims. He drives it under the victim’s Mercedes and detonates it. This must be a good method to kill someone, because he later tries to do the same thing to Harry and his partner. Harry is onto his plan, though. When Harry sees the little remote control Corvette coming, he accelerates away, spawning one of the worst chase scenes in the history of action cinema. Harry’s car is chased by the remote control car, which is followed by the bad guy in his own car controlling the remote control car (see, he has to stay in range so the RC car will still work). They’re flying down empty streets, jumping over hills, skidding around turns…no tension whatsoever. I’ve heard that this scene is supposed to pay homage to the chase scene in Bullitt. It failed.

Patricia Clarkson plays a TV reporter named Samantha Walker that becomes involved in the Dead Pool case. She’s hot in that 1980’s fuzzy filter-lens sort of way. Harry doesn’t like her at first, but they soon warm to each other’s company (a scene where a dude sets himself on fire and a shootout in an outside elevator help speed up their relationship) and become pretty good pals by the end of the movie. She gets kidnapped by the killer but Dirty Harry saves her. He chases down the killer and sets up the final confrontation. Do you remember how the killer likes to murder his victims based on scenes from director Swan’s movies. Well, earlier in the film there was a scene where a harpoon was used to kill someone in the fake movie, Hotel Satan (or it may have been a different movie, like The Dead Sea or something, I can’t remember). The final confrontation ends up in the same location as that scene, and in an ironic turn of events, the killer is killed in the same way that he would have killed a future victim if given the chance. He is impaled by a giant harpoon. But not before Harry gets to recite some pretty amazing dialogue while emerging from a cloud of steam—“You’re out of bullets. And you know what that means…you’re shit out of luck.” The writers must have thought that shit out of luck line was pure genius. They used it twice. It’s kind of like the way they used the “do you feel lucky punk” phrase twice in the first move and the “go ahead, make my day” phrase twice in Sudden Impact. You gotta stick to the formula. Awesome.

The moral of this movie is that some people can become obsessed with violence in film. This obsession may turn those people into violent murderers. If they decide to kill someone, they shouldn’t chase them around San Francisco with a remote control car. It’s not too effective. Also, one big bullet (.44 caliber) is way more effective than lots of small bullets (9mm).