Plot
Fame finally catches up with Harry Callahan. His testimony against crime kingpin Lou Janero puts the mobster in prison and Callahan on the cover of a San Francisco magazine as the city's ace crime fighter. Callahan is attacked by Janero's men at a turnoff near the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge while driving. He knocks down one with his car and shoots the remaining men dead. Callahan and his new Asian-American, martial arts-skilled partner Al Quan (Evan Kim) are then assigned to investigate the death of rock singer Johnny Squares (Jim Carrey), killed in his trailer outside a meatpacking plant during filming of a slasher film directed by Peter Swan (Liam Neeson).
Later, Dean Madison, Swan's executive producer, is shot and killed during a Chinatown restaurant stick-up. Harry and Quan see the holdup and rush to stop it; Harry manages to gun down all of the robbers inside the restaurant, except for one who manages to escape out the door but is subdued by Quan's expert martial-arts skills. When they examine the dead producer's belongings, they discover a note in his pocket with Harry and Johnny Squares's names on it. It turns out that the dead producer and Swan are carrying out a "dead pool" game in which participants try to predict celebrity deaths, either by natural causes or as a result of working in dangerous professions. In a turn of events, another celebrity on Swan's list, movie critic Molly Fisher, is stabbed and killed in her condominium.
Callahan is asked to cooperate with the media (particularly reporter and later love interest Samantha Walker) to balance their interference with the investigation. Walker proposes to do an in-depth profile on Callahan for her news report, to make up for an incident earlier in the film where Harry threw and ruined Walker's camera in an attempt to stop her crew from harassing Squares' girlfriend. However, Callahan wants to simply perform his job and stay out of the limelight. After dinner, they narrowly escape being killed by Janero's men, leading the reporter to reconsider the plight of police officers versus the public's right to know.
Callahan drives to the prison where Janero is serving his sentence. He promises a huge, chain-smoking quadruple murderer named Butcher Hicks a carton of cigarettes for his help in convincing Janero that if anything bad happens to Callahan, the vicious Butcher will pay Janero a visit. This results in Janero's telling his men to stay away from Callahan while he is on duty. Callahan defuses a situation wherein a man named Gus Wheeler, rumored to be responsible for the murders, tries to get on the TV news by dousing himself in gasoline and threatening to light himself on fire if he even sees a fire truck or hose. Ultimately, it turns out that Wheeler is just an attention-seeker desperate to appear on camera. Harry and Quan later interview Swan and manage to get the name of another suspect: Harlan Rook, a schizophrenic and deranged fan of Swan who thinks his ideas and work have been stolen by Swan. Swan had gotten a restraining order against Rook about a year before.
Rook next kills controversial talk show host Nolan Kennard, another person on the list, using an ingenious device; he runs a remote control car containing a C4 explosive charge under the victim's vehicle as he is backing out of his driveway, and detonates it. Rook's car bomb is undetected by Callahan at the crime scene, although he does find a wheel of the radio control car, but thinks nothing of it until later, when he spots another radio controlled car following him in the streets. Callahan and Quan are pursued in their unmarked car through San Francisco's hilly streets by Rook's radio car, and by Rook himself in a full-size car. Eventually Callahan and Al Quan come to a dead end in an alleyway and the bomb car advances on them. Harry manages to reverse the car seconds before the bomb explodes, causing only the engine bay of his car to blow up (the firewall absorbs most of the explosive force). Quan is wounded in the blast, surviving with only broken ribs thanks to his bulletproof vest.
Rook, disguised as Swan, calls Walker at the television station and invites her to Swan's film studio for an interview, which is actually a trap. The police, meanwhile raid Rook's apartment and discover torn posters of Swan's films and large quantities of explosives. Callahan hurries to Swan's studio, where Walker is held captive by Rook. Harry reluctantly surrenders his .44 Magnum revolver after Rook nearly slits her throat. Callahan lures him to a pier after a chase. Rook eventually runs out of ammunition, and Callahan uses this opportunity to shoot Rook with a harpoon, impaling him. Callahan leaves with Walker while the police arrive at the scene.
Read more about this topic: The Dead Pool
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)