The funniest Clint Eastwood directorial effort I've seen yet. He stars with squeeze-of-that-moment Sondra Locke in an inversion-of-sorts of his Dirty Harry persona. His mediocre but straight and incorruptible policeman drops lots of f-bombs, some non-P.C. cliches about women and (obviously) still comes out the winner. Locke does what she can in a hooker-in-distress role who cannot help falling in love with Clint. Notionally he's there to get her from Las Vegas to Phoenix to testify in some case but really it's about moving from set piece to set piece. There's a nod to Easy Rider, a cop car shot to hell, a helicopter that randomly explodes when the pilot expertly fails to avoid some powerlines. The climactic scenes have the pair go all Ned Kelly in an armoured bus on a kamikaze mission to stick it to City Hall. They keep telling us that the mob wants to kill them but the actual objective is to assassinate property: apart from the vehicles there's a house that really cops it. Most of the shooting scenes drag on and on. Written by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "a movie without a single thought in its head."
