Deadly Hero (1976) Reviews

Don Murray plays Lacy, a blatantly bigoted New York cop who finds that his rabid hatred forces him into a bloody rampage in order to save himself and his job in the derivative cop melodrama Deadly Hero. At one point in the film, Lacy rehearses a speech to be given to a cadre of right-wingers by intoning, "These are troubled times." This is certainly the case for Lacy, since this 18-year veteran of the NYPD has been demoted from detective to patrol car because of his liberal use of deadly force on nasty perpetrators. When Lacy, a lit fuse of seething anger and racial epithets, encounters nasty black mugger Rabbit (James Earl Jones), who is terrorizing young schoolteacher Sally (Diahn Williams) at knifepoint in her apartment, it doesn't take much for the cop to decide to put the thug on terror alert by shooting him. Is Sally grateful for blowing away the object of her torture? To Lacy's surprise, she instead testifies against him, accusing him of being a cold-blooded killer. Now Lacy has to figure out a way out of this high-shootin' mess. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi