At the end of Dirty Harry, tough guy Inspector Harry Callahan guns down the Scorpio Killer. In 1971, audiences were primed to see a Zodiac Killer stand-in get so definitively taken down. But Callahan himself felt clear remorse for crossing a line. After killing Scorpio, Callahan tosses his badge into a murky pond and walks away, no longer fit to be a police officer.
Despite the moral clarity Callahan shows in Dirty Harry, and when he goes up against rogue cops in the sequel Magnum Force, audiences loved the rough and tumble attitude embraced by Dirty Harry and The French Connection‘s Popeye Doyle, who also terrorized criminals in 1971. And by the time the ambiguity of the New Hollywood era gave way to the glossy excess of the 1980s, cops were blowing up baddies with impunity. Still, not all cop movies were the same. Here are the 15 most outrageous cop films, ranked according to how much they break the law in order to enforce what’s left of it.
12. RoboCop (1988)
As one would expect from Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop features all manner of mayhem. In his quest for self-actualization, and/or vengeance, RoboCop blasts off genitals, drives over toxic waste victims, and stabs a baddie with a proto-USB stick. And yet, RoboCop never breaks any laws.
Which is kinda the point. RoboCop takes place in a future where Omni Consumer Products exerts the power of the law, hoping to raze Detroit and replace it with Delta City. When officer Alex Murphy dies a violent death, he becomes an agent of punishment for OCP, enforcing the law that suits them. So while RoboCop violates the spirit of the law, he’s programmed to never cross the letter of the law, which is the point of Verhoeven’s satire.
11. Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Before saying goodbye to actual Beverly Hills cops Rosewood and Taggart, Detroit sleuth Axel Foley chastizes his (eventual) partners. “The super cop story was working. Okay?” he chides. “It was working, and you guys just messed it up… You fucked up a perfectly good lie.”
Perfectly good lies are Axel Foley’s Modus Operandi, because they give Eddie Murphy the chance to show off his immense charisma and prodigious talent for riffing. Which means that Axel hunts down baddie Victor Maitland (Steven Berkoff) by ignoring suspects’ privacy, due process, or basic interrogation rights. No, that’s not as bad as the guys who gun down suspects in others ’80s movies. But it’s still illegal and arguably more frightening because it happens a lot more often in real life than the shootings.
10. Maniac Cop (1988)
On one hand, Maniac Cop is a slasher about a killer dressed like a police officer. But, crucially, the killer is not an active duty cop. In fact, the Maniac Cop Matthew Cordell (Robert Z’Dar) lost his badge and gun when he went to jail for police brutality. Turns out his imprisonment wasn’t altogether legal itself, and when Cordell gets released, free but scarred, he’s ready to inflict his own type of justice.
Directed by William Lustig and written by Larry Cohen, Maniac Cop wants to say something about scuzzy New York police but doesn’t have the conviction to stick to the concept. So while Cordell wreaks havoc dressed in blue, good cops Forest (Bruce Campbell) and McCrae (Tom Atkins) save the day by bringing the Maniac Cop down, reinforcing a “one bad apple” narrative used by so many real cops.
9. Running Scared (1986)
Nobody would consider Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines, the two leads of buddy cop action movie Running Scared, the toughest pair on this list. Maybe that’s why the duo feels the need to make their Chicago officers Hughes (Hines) and Costanzo (Crystal) so unpleasant.
At the start of Running Scared, Hughes and Costanzo harass a small-time hood called Snake (Joe Pantoliano). When they discover a briefcase full of cash, the cops decide to hold the money and bring him in for questioning. As Snake points out, he hasn’t committed a crime. So what does Costanzo do? He goes into the middle of Snake’s low-income neighborhood and asks everyone he sees to promise that they won’t break into his apartment and steal the large sum of money he holds.
Director Peter Hyams wants the viewers to see the gambit as a bit of “ain’t I a stinker” smartassedness, but forgets that comedy doesn’t work when it punches down. And so everything that follows, with Hughes and Costanzo on a madcap chase for their life, feels like a just response to two cops abusing their power.
8. 48 Hrs. (1982)
Walter Hill’s electrifying two-hander 48 Hrs. didn’t invent the buddy cop movie, but it did popularize it thanks to the unlikely pair at the center. To stop violent criminal Albert Ganz (James Remar) and his partner Billy Bear (Sonny Landham), grizzled cop Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) needs the help of inmate Reggie Hammond (Murphy, in his first movie), a one-time associate of Ganz. With Reggie signed out for a 48-hour release, Cates will do whatever it takes to get his man.
And, relatively speaking, he doesn’t have to do that much. Perhaps the most illegal moment occurs when he lets Reggie pretend to be a cop and push around a bunch of rednecks. The scene doesn’t bother watchers because (a) it’s hard to sympathize with a bunch of racist hicks, and (b) Murphy’s movie star ascension begins in that moment. But, still, it is an illegal abuse of power.
7. Die Hard (1988)
As John McClane (Bruce Willis) tells limo driver Argyle (De’voreaux White) and anyone else who will listen, he’s a New York cop who feels out of place in Los Angeles. But McClane is not going to let something like lack of jurisdiction keep him from defending Nakatomi Plaza against Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his team of highly gifted mercenaries.
Like 48 Hrs., Die Hard‘s violations don’t bother viewers because Willis has charisma to spare and director John McTiernan knows how to make an action masterpiece. Furthermore, everyone who stands against McClane, whether it be Feds pulling rank or any local cop who isn’t Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) is a buffoon. Die Hard draws from the still-lingering resentment from Vietnam, where the generals calling the shots didn’t have the same smarts as the soldiers on the ground. That ethos helps sell any of McClane’s law-bending, even if most viewers were in junior high (or, you know, not even born) during the Vietnam War.
6. Sudden Impact (1988)
As the above summary shows, Harry Callahan may have been dirty, but not as much as in the sequels. The final two substandard Dirty Harry movies, Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool, are a bit too wracked with conscience to keep up with Harry’s hardbodied children, but the former tries its best.
An incredibly unpleasant film, the Clint Eastwood-directed Sudden Impact begins with a woman getting gang raped (played by Eastwood’s real-life lover, Sondra Locke) and just gets nastier from there. To its credit(?), Sudden Impact tries to reconcile with the tension between Callahan’s extreme methods and the fact that he gets results. But given the nastiness of the central crime, Sudden Impact stays totally on Callahan’s side, convinced that the law must be broken to stop extreme sickos.
5. Code of Silence (1985)
As we’ll see again shortly, director Andrew Davis made his name by getting excellent performances out of action heroes with zero charisma. In Code of Silence, he pulls that trick with Chuck Norris, a man whose martial arts abilities impressed Bruce Lee, and whose acting chops impressed nobody. Davis gets a lot of help in Code of Silence by filling the movie with great supporting actors, including Dennis Farina, Henry Silva, and Ron Dean.
But as much as the ensemble cast helps spread out a twinge responsibility, it also makes the Chicago PD look really, really corrupt. Which, to its credit, is kind of the point of Code of Silence. Written by Michael Butler, Dennis Shryack, and Mike Gray, Code of Silence deals with a Chicago gang war that erupts after a corrupt cop kills an innocent. The resulting turmoil forces the officers to decide if they stand for the law or for the badge, and while Norris’s Eddie Cusack fights for the former, a lot of others do not.
4. Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
“It’s just been revoked,” sneers Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) before he kills corrupt South African official Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) who just invoked diplomatic immunity. It’s hard to see how an aging sergeant has the right to revoke any diplomat’s immunity, even if that diplomat is an Afrikaner who extolls the virtues of Apartheid South Africa and the sergeant is a Black man. But then, Murtaugh and his partner Riggs (Mel Gibson) already committed their fair share of questionable activity in the first Lethal Weapon from 1987, directed by Richard Donner.
Donner returns for the sequel, but while original screenwriter Shane Black has a story credit, alongside Warren Murphy, Jeffrey Boam gets the sole script credit on this follow-up. This bundle of names makes it hard to see who exactly deserves the fault for pushing Murtaugh to the brink instead of making him keep Riggs in check. When Murtaugh gets too old to be the sensible one, Lethal Weapon falls out of joint, and both cops engage in all manner of illegal behavior to take down their reprehensible quarry in a third act bloodbath.
3. Above the Law (1988)
If they’re not thinking about his embarrassing line of direct-to-video action movies or supporting dictators like Vladimir Putin, anyone who hears the name Steven Seagal thinks of 1992’s Under Siege. And with good reason. Seagal may be the world’s least convincing action star, but Under Siege rules, thanks to the real star Tommy Lee Jones and the director Andrew Davis. Before Under Siege, Davis got an earlier solid performance from Seagal with Above the Law.
As much as Davis crafts some excellent actions sequences, he can only do so much for a story burdened by Seagal’s conspiracy-heavy approach. Seagal plays a former special ops officer turned Chicago cop who uncovers a CIA operation on American citizens. As the title suggests, Seagal uses his badge and gun for influence and access, but has no use for the law. Seagal’s Nico Toscani kills with impunity, violates privacy, and does anything else he feels entitled to do, all justified because he’s fighting some even worse power. At least Davis makes it look good.
2. Red Heat (1988)
Before going into an interrogation with a suspect (played by all-time ’80s that guy Brion James), Chicago detective Art Ridzik (Jim Belushi) instructs his Russian counterpart Captain Ivan Danko (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in American protocol. Because of Miranda rights, Ridzik explains, cops cannot brutalize people in the States. “We can’t even touch his ass,” declares Ridzik.
“I don’t want to touch his ass,” responds a stone-faced Danko. “I want him to talk.”
The humor of that line helps sell a lot of the absurdity in Red Heat, which is directed by Walter Hill. When a Russian criminal goes on the run in the Windy City, Soviet law enforcer Danko must team with slovenly Ridzik, a variation on the buddy cop formula Hill popularized with 48 Hrs. But it’s a bit rich to have Ridzik play “good cop” in the scene, given that his first introduction begins with him theorizing about a sex worker’s breasts and ends with him sticking a gun to a Black man’s head and threatening to shoot, because he looks like boxer Marvin Hagler. And yet, Ridzik is the more law-abiding one next to Danko, who knocks around the suspect as a form of interrogation.
1. Cobra (1986)
After massacring a gunman at the start of Cobra, detective Marion Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone) must face the wrath of officious detective Monte (Andrew Robinson). Monte yells at Cobretti about the rights of the gunman he just killed… at least until oiur hero yanks a tarp to reveal the body of a dead boy. “What about his rights?” bellows Cobretti, ending the argument on ethical and legal grounds, apparently.
That exchange captures both the overheated tone and reactionary moral perspective of Cobra, directed by George P. Cosmatos and based on Stallone’s own revisions to the Beverly Hills Cop script. It feels like Stallone is trying to out-dirty Dirty Harry, and not just because he pushes around Andrew Robinson, who played Callahan’s first antagonist, the Scorpio Killer. Some might be tempted to support Cobretti’s methods when he’s dealing with a cult of axe-killers, but Cobra also uses his authority to pick on some neighbors who park their car in a place he doesn’t like. Cobretti is the ultimate police state nightmare, even more than Stallone’s later character, Judge Dredd.
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