10 ToughAsNails Cop Thrillers To Watch If You Like Dirty Harry
10 Tough-As-Nails Cop Thrillers To Watch If You Like Dirty Harry
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From End of Watch to Heat, here are 10 cop thrillers with hard-as-nails protagonists to check out if you like Dirty Harry.
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Cops make for very interesting protagonists. A protagonist needs to be a hero, and a cop’s job is to be a hero, so it’s a no-brainer. Sometimes, cops in movies and TV shows will play by the rules and follow their captain’s orders and respect any red tape put up by the commissioner.
But we all know the most interesting ones are the ones who bend the rules to get the job done, like Harry Callahan from Clint Eastwood’s iconic Dirty Harry series of action movies. So, here are 10 Tough-As-Nails Cop Thrillers To Watch If You Like Dirty Harry.
10 End of Watch
The “found footage” format is usually reserved for horror films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, but it has been applied to other genres, like comedy (Project X) and superhero movies (Chronicle). With End of Watch, David Ayer brought the “found footage” style to the cop thriller.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña star as the lead pair of officers. You have to suspend your disbelief in the scenes where gang lords shoot home movies of their drug-hazed parties with camcorders, but End of Watch is a compelling police thriller that blurs the line between good guys and bad guys.
9 Bullitt
Complete with one of the most breathtaking car chase sequences ever put on film – with each cut so precisely placed that it won Frank P. Keller an Academy Award – Bullitt is one of the earliest classical action films. Steve McQueen stars as Lt. Frank Bullitt, one of the toughest lawmen to grace the silver screen, who is assigned to protect a witness.
When that witness is murdered, Bullitt becomes determined to bring the culprits down, even though it means traversing the shady criminal underworld to track down the crime lord responsible. Bullitt plays out like a western set in modern-day San Francisco.
8 Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Tarantino’s indie directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, is not necessarily a police movie. The story focuses on a jewelry store heist, but it’s told from the perspective of the criminals – until one of them is revealed to be an undercover cop. Then, the tension is ratcheted up as the surviving robbers turn against one another.
Most of them don’t know each other, so they don’t know who they can trust. Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, and Michael Madsen round out a terrific cast. The cast’s performances are what really sell this movie, as it’s dialogue-driven, with very little action.
7 Blitz
Jason Statham’s most famous movies are bombastic action thrillers, like the Transporter movies and the Expendables movies, but a few years ago, he starred in this more cerebral blend of police procedural, gritty crime thriller, and social issues drama, and it’s easily one of his best films. A masked killer has been going around London, shooting police officers.
For Statham’s cop character, this is a personal case. As the investigation runs into dead ends and legal loopholes, keeping the killer out on the streets, Statham has to figure out how he’s going to bend the rules to bring this guy to justice.
6 Heat
Michael Mann finally got Al Pacino and Robert De Niro to share the screen in this slick L.A.-set crime epic. Heat is a cat-and-mouse thriller in which Pacino plays a hard-as-nails cop and De Niro plays the master bank robber that he’s after. The movie’s intense conflict boils down to the iconic diner scene, which brought Pacino and De Niro together to match their acting talents.
The study of corruption and violence ravaging the American city that is prominent throughout Heat provided Christopher Nolan with the inspiration he needed to direct The Dark Knight as a rounded vision of Gotham.
5 The Rookie
This movie is so similar that some fans even consider it to be a spiritual successor to the Dirty Harry franchise. Clint Eastwood directed himself in the movie, and his grizzled veteran cop character Nick Pulovski has been viewed as an older version of Harry Callahan. The movie tells the story of a cynical cop who is paired up with a younger, more optimistic partner who reinvigorates his belief in police work.
It’s a movie we’ve seen a thousand times before, but with Eastwood at the helm, there’s a lot more pathos and humanity in The Rookie than in most hacky buddy cop movies using the same tired clichés.
4 Fargo
With a pitch-black sense of humor and a bunch of characters being affected by outrageous situations, Fargo just might be the quintessential Coen brothers movie. William H. Macy plays an insurance salesman who pays two criminals to kidnap his wife in order to bilk her rich father out of some cash.
When the kidnapping goes awry and witnesses get into the mix, a cop played by Frances McDormand is brought in to investigate. The parallel storylines of the salesman, the cop, and the kidnappers weave in and out of one another like rush-hour traffic, gripping you from every perspective from beginning to end.
3 The French Connection
The Exorcist’s William Friedkin directed this crime thriller about some New York cops investigating the bigger heroin-smuggling operation in the world. Ernest Tidyman’s screenplay was adapted from a non-fiction book about a real-life investigation, although the names of those involved have been changed and composited from the source material.
Gene Hackman stars as “Popeye” Doyle, one of the most iconic cops to ever fight crime on the big screen, while Roy Scheider and Fernando Rey appear in supporting roles alongside him. At the end of this movie, Friedkin makes thought-provoking use of the ambiguous ending, which is a make-or-break trope.
2 Training Day
Directed by Antoine Fuqua and scripted by David Ayer, Training Day is one of the grittiest, most riveting police thrillers of the 21st century. Ethan Hawke plays a naive rookie cop just starting out, while an Oscar-winning Denzel Washington plays the veteran cop – who also turns out to be crooked – who is assigned to welcome him to the unit.
With its compelling and complex plot revealing more about the characters and their environment in each unfolding scene, Training Day is a pulse-racing cinematic thrill-ride. The movie tackles corrupt institutions, which makes it a sociological story, and also shows the cops as a product of their surroundings, which makes it a psychological story.
1 Hard Boiled
John Woo pioneered “gun-fu,” which has gone on to dominate action cinema, so the genre owes Woo a great debt. The pinnacle of Woo’s abilities is arguably the movie Hard Boiled, which starred the great Chow Yun-Fat as “Tequila” Yuen, and whose story was designed to rely on action set pieces.
Instead of being a regular story that occasionally took breaks for an action scene, Hard Boiled was constructed entirely of action scenes, because that’s what fans of the genre want. All the best action movies do this, prioritizing visual storytelling through action over exposition, which let’s face it, is just lazy writing.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/tough-as-nails-cop-thrillers-like-dirty-harry/
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