"Trust me, I know what I'm doing!"
If you locked the writers of "Dirty Harry" in a room full of typewriters and crystal meth, their results would look more or less like "Sledge Hammer!", a side-splitting spoof of the cop genre. "Sledge Hammer!" debuted in 1986, garnering critical attention but poor ratings (most likely due its bad time slot and that damn laugh track). In one of those "can't make this up" twists, the writers decided to face the inevitable cancellation by having the main character blow himself up in the season finale... only the show itself actually got renewed. Oops. All 41 episodes (now available on DVD) follow Sledge Hammer (played to perfection by comically handsome David Rasche), a sneering, sexist police detective who takes the term "trigger happy" to a whole new, surreal level. Carrying his beloved, ivory handled Magnum .44 the way Paris Hilton carries her chihuahua, Hammer does everything with good old "Gun", from flipping pancakes to sleeping with it. A man who loves violence more than life itself, Hammer finds excuses to shoot, karate chop, or sucker punch someone, anyone who comes within his field of vision. Hammer's two foils are his long suffering boss Chief Trunk (Harrison Page) and Dori Dorough (Anne Marie Martin, better known as the ex-Mrs. Michael Crichton), Hammer's cool, capable, lovely partner who acts as Agent 99 to Hammer's Maxwell Smart. Yet, due to gumption and dumb luck, Hammer cracks every case he's given... while cracking, shattering, and blowing up everything else around him. It may be cheesy and tame by today's standards, but "Sledge Hammer!" remains uproarious entertainment, mostly due to its innocent approach to its story about a cop who's really a menace to society. Rasche emphasizes this approach by playing Hammer in the most straightforward way possible. While it's a shame the series didn't last that long, we can at least pop in our DVDs of "Sledge Hammer!" and remember it as it was: a loopy trip of a show that showed how absurd and hilarious violence could be.score /10
lauraeileen894 29 January 2007
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1585726/14897
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