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In "Dead Bang," Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Homicide Detective Jerry Beck (Don Johnson) is no "Dirty Harry," although he carries an enormous six-shot revolver like he does but doesn't have Clint Eastwood's "Do you feel lucky?" slyness. Beck is also no "Lethal Weapon," although he drinks heavily, swears constantly, is flat broke because he's going through a crumbling marriage that's resulted in a restraining order being filed against him by his wife that prevents him from seeing their two young children, and at one point he even undergoes a psychiatric analysis for his erratic and reckless behavior of late.

Of course, as all of this is going on, all Beck really has left is his job, which is also contributing significantly to his stress. A seemingly random convenience store robbery on Christmas Eve night leads to the brutal shooting of its manager (who miraculously survives) and the cold-blooded execution-style murder of a uniformed LASD deputy. The evidence puts Beck on the trail of Robert "Bobby" Burns (Frank Military), a recently paroled ex-convict who just did four years in prison for armed robbery and who is also the leader of a gang of murderous white supremacist militiamen thugs, and he tracks them for 1,500 miles from L. A. to their heavily fortified stronghold in the backwoods of Boulder, Colorado. Along the way, Beck not only deals with his impending divorce, but also a by-the-book FBI special agent named Arthur Kressler (a surprisingly clean-shaven William Forsythe) and a friendly black Boulder Police officer named Captain Dixon (Tim Reid), and then there's also the situation regarding Linda Kimble (Penelope Ann Miller), whom he has a one-night stand with after he meets her at a Christmas Eve party and who also has a not-so-surprising connection to his latest case.

"Dead Bang" was the 1989 action-thriller directed by the late action maestro John Frankenheimer and based on the real-life exploits of Jerome "Jerry" Beck, who also worked on the film's story with the screenwriter Robert Foster. "Dead Bang" seems like a weird and wild cross-section of the aforementioned "Dirty Harry" and "Lethal Weapon" film series, with a surprisingly effective Don Johnson (most famous at the time for the "Miami Vice" TV series) at the lead and some of the requisite car chases, shoot-outs and explosions - and even some rightly timed black humor (see an early foot chase between Beck and one of Burns's not-yet-quite-reformed criminal associates) - it doesn't feel like another tired re-tread of the "rogue cop" genre, which was also popular at the time and had gotten some new life breathed into by "Lethal Weapon" (1987) from two years earlier. Despite Frankenheimer's creative and stylish flourishes, the fact that "Dead Bang" is based on a real-life person (however embellished the details may be) does help to ground the story in reality - well, about as "real" as a story like this can possibly get.

Lastly, "Dead Bang" was also one of the earliest mainstream Hollywood action films to ever deal with the threat posed by the modern American white supremacist movement, which was still emerging at the time of the film's release in 1989 and would become a major concern for law enforcement by the early 1990s and onward up to today. So "Dead Bang" now seems kind of prescient in a sense.

7/10.