One Man Jury (1978)

Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974) have a lot to answer for, unleashing a cinematic deluge of rogue cops and 'decent ordinary citizens' taking the law into their own hands and blowing away anyone they suspect of being a wrong doer.  One Man Jury (1978) tries to up the ante by combining both genres: its cop hero doesn't just bend the rules and deny scumbag criminals their rights every so often, he goes full on vigilante, cold bloodedly shooting suspects.  Of course, Magnum Force (1973), the first sequel to Dirty Harry, features a group of vigilante cops dispensing 'justice' to those the courts apparently can't touch, but the plot puts them in opposition to Harry Callaghan - he's just a rogue cop, not a vigilante cop, who only beats up suspects, rather than shooting them.  One Man Jury, however, clearly wants the audience to identify with its vigilante cop hero, as it parades a gallery of utter scumbag gangsters, rapists and serial killers before viewers, all of whom are constantly set free to terrorise the public by an overly liberal justice system.  The film's hero might well end up facing his own form of justice in a twist ending, but it is clear that we're still meant leave the cinema thinking tat, bay and large, he was entirely justified in his campaign of extra-judicial 'justice'.

Of course, such reactionary attitudes could be overlooked if the film itself was excitingly made, with good characterisation, well-staged set pieces and plenty of suspense.  Unfortunately, despite some superficially good production values, it is a somewhat roughly made film, that falls well below the standards set by the first couple of 'Dirty Harry' movies for this sort of film.  Its slackly directed plot is all over the place, jumping between sub-plots in a way which fatally slows down the action and prevents it building any kind of rhythm.  While it is clearly trying to imitate the 'Dirty Harry' films, which frequently feature their hero in various vignettes unconnected to the main plot, unlike those films, it doesn't use these deviations to develop aspects of its main character or more clearly establish his main traits.  Moreover, in the 'Dirty Harry' series, these vignettes are never allowed to slow down or distract from the main plot.  One of the main problems of One Man Jury is that its main character never actually develops in any way - his attitudes are clearly established early on and never change.  He learns nothing from his experiences, remaining unchanged by them.  

I had hopes for One Man Jury's entertainment value based upon the fact that the lead is played by Jack Palance - you'd expect any rogue cop played by him to be so rampantly reactionary that he'd regard Dirty Harry as a limp-wristed liberal.  His performance, however, is curiously subdued, nowhere near the lunatic intensity of his scenery chewing antics in things like Hawk the Slayer or The Warning, although One Man Jury's subject matter is just crying out for such excesses - it would have enlivened the film no end.  Part of the doubtless lies with the fact that his character doesn't make a great of sense: a reactionary lawman who believes that the 'system' as it stands is incapable of delivering justice, yet remains part of that system by not only serving as a cop, but also teaching criminology classes in his spare time!  He eschews 'liberal values' while still quite happily shacking up with a much younger woman, who is also one of his students.  There is no nuance to the character, none of the ambiguity displayed by Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan and certainly no exploration of the validity of his beliefs.  There is a fairly decent supporting cast, including Chris Mitchum, (as Palance's partner) and Joe Spinell and Andy Romano as hoods, but, like Palance, they struggle to make any impact in the face of a stodgy script. One Man Jury, in the final analysis, is simply an attempt to cash-in on the success of a cycle of films of which both the official sequels to the originals (Dirty Harry and Death Wish) and their imitators were already running out of steam.  The most surprising thing about One Man Jury was that it wasn't an Italian production, as it has all the hall marks of a cheap Italian rip off.