What happens when men in blue, sworn to protect and to serve, fly out of control? If we're lucky, we get a good movie out of it. If we're really lucky, we get a larger than life character to cheer and to fear. Are you feeling lucky, punk?

Keanu Reaves, of all people, will follow in the steel-toed shoes of some of cinema's finest as a cop who goes on an avenging rampage in David Ayer's Street Kings, which opens tomorrow. That made me reflect on my favorite out of control cinematic cops, men in blue who break free from the laws of god and man. Let us know who we missed in the comments section. But be nice, or we'll track you down and crack you over the head with a night stick.

1. Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry

Clint is so cool as Harry Callahan that he can just glare at bad guys and they give themselves up. Dirty Harry never met a criminal he couldn't beat up, a sergeant he couldn't hate, or a partner he couldn't get killed. He can't help it: he married justice a long time ago and the blind old bat won't leave him alone until he takes out the garbage. Don't even think about getting in his way: he solved the Zodiac killings in 102 minutes! Dirty Harry paved the way for several sequels and countless gruff, lone wolf outlaw police detectives.

• Carl Pingitore (1924-2008) - Editor of Dirty Harry, for which he was also an associate producer, Play Misty for Me, Across 110th Street, Prime Cut and That Man Bolt. He won an Emmy for producing the series Police Story and was nominated for producing the 1981 TV documentary High Hopes: The Capra Years, about film director Frank Capra. He died February 23, in Eureka, California. (Times-Standard)

• Richard Baer (1928-2008) - Television writer (Bewitched) who also apparently appeared uncredited in Citizen Kane as a character called "Hillman". He also wrote a 1958 Columbia Pictures-released film titled Life Begins at 17. He died February 22 in Santa Monica, California. (Variety)
• William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008) - Author and conservative commentator who appears as himself in the documentaries Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, New York in the Fifties, The Source, Kerouac, the Movie, What Happened to Kerouac? and Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S. Thompson on Film. He died of emphysema February 27, in Stamford, Connecticut. (Variety)
• W.C. Heinz (1915-2008) - Journalist and novelist who co-wrote the novel MASH, which was adapted into a film and television series, with H. Richard Hornberger (jointly they used the pseudonym Richard Hooker). He also appears in Ken Burns' documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. He died February 27, in Montpelier, Vermont. (NY Times)

Shoot 'Em Up opens this week, and Clive Owen is making Bugs Bunny look all sorts of tough and cool. He banters. He sexes up the ladies. He handles guns like a pro. Heck, he even tries to buy them with food stamps. All this badness and guns has thrown me into an antihero state of mind. But before I can go a-listing, we've got to decide what an antihero is.

Blending all of the vague definitions together, your antihero is basically the person who doesn't imbue the classic attributes of heroism. This could mean being inept and stupid, but for the means of this list, I'm going for the antiheroes whose methods, manners and intentions can be questioned. Some are good guys who do bad things, some are bad guys who do good things. Some just don't care as much as a good hero should. But they're all so uber cool that whether you've seen the films or not, you know who they are, and you might just be quoting them.

Note: Only one cop is included on this list, and it isn't John McClane -- he's much more of a bitter hero than a questionable antihero.

Harry Callahan -- Dirty Harry (1971)

I know what you're thinking: "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

While I love most of the guys on this list, the one who has to be there above all others is Dirty Harry Callahan. He might be a cop trying to keep the streets safe, but instead of upholding the law, he enforces morality with his gun, boot, or whatever else he can find. In the first of the action series, Callahan is hunting down Scorpio, a serial killer loosely based on the Zodiac killer. He tortures suspects when he needs to, and does it all in a suit, tie and sweater. Most of all, he's "Dirty," but no one knows the specific reason why.

Oftentimes Hollywood's lack of originality leads to overexposed trends. Remember when every action movie seemed to be easily defined as 'Die Hard on a ...'? Remember when disaster movies were all the rage? And then twenty years later when they were all the rage again? Remember when there were like a hundred body-swapping comedies? Well, there appear to be fewer trends these days, or maybe it's just that Hollywood turns trends into full-blown practices, as in the case of sequels, comic book movies and fantasy films based on literary franchises. Nowadays even a promised trend, like the one involving religious Passion of the Christ copycats, isn't necessarily going to happen. But despite there being so few here-today-gone-tomorrow film fads, there's at least seven bad ideas currently in vogue in Tinsel Town, and all of them need to disappear soon, lest they too become permanent.

1. Torture Porn

I'm going to start with an easy, surely obvious one. Torture porn is the latest trend in horror, a genre that changes its predominant style every few years, and it may be the most despised -- at least by us non-horror junkies. I miss the days when a friend, an actual junkie, could drag me to a harmless scary movie that provided a few screams, a few laughs and afterward, at the most, a few silly nightmares. Now, with each new horror movie there's promise of a seriously depressing experience. After watching The Hills Have Eyes, I realized I hadn't been frightened at all. Instead I wanted to cry my heart out. I haven't been to a horror flick since, and my friend is going solo. Sure, I hear that Eli Roth's movies are a lot more enjoyable than watching a young woman raped while watching her father burned alive and her mother raped and then shot in the head, but I just haven't been in the mood to find out.

Apparently the torture porn trend is already on its way out. Hostel II performed poorly at the box office and Captivity may have peaked too soon, reaching maximum tastelessness before even opening in theaters. So what will be next? I'm rather looking forward to when slasher movies are in fashion again, when I can delight in seeing sinful human beings killed off quickly and deservedly by an implausible maniac. Which brings me to the next trend ...

Get ready for a Dirty Harry overload, kids: Warner Brothers announced yesterday that 2007 will see reissues of all five Harry Callahan films, as well as the release of a new videogame based on the character. Because the announcement was made at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (aka E3 3E, which our gamer brother Joystiq is covering like crazy), the DVDs were presented simply as supporting material for the game's big launch but, given the work that it sounds like is going into the DVDs, I'm thinking that was more about the audience than Warner's actual view of the relationship between the releases.

The game will feature the unmistakable voice of Clint Eastwood (who is, he said, stoked to get to pretend he's 40 again), reprising his role as Callahan, as well as those of Gene Hackman, who will voice Lieutenant Al Bressler (played in the movies by Harry Guardino) and Laurence Fishburne as a new character named Reverend Carlton Clay. The movies, meanwhile, will be released together in an epic box set, and are expected to feature commentary from Eastwood as well as "footage from the vaults," among other luscious extras. Sweet sweet sweet.

While I personally couldn't really care less about the videogame, if it's what gave Warners the push they needed to treat these movies right, I'm all for it. Now if we could just get someone to make a Chimes at Midnight game ...