I remember back around 1990 comic/actor Robert Wuhl said during a stand-up routine that if you counted all the good Burt Reynolds movies on one hand, you’d still have some fingers left over. This was around the time he had appeared in the crime comedy Breaking In directed by Bill Forsyth.
But it still wasn’t enough as he had to turn to TV to help keep his career afloat with B.L. Stryker and Evening Shade. Boogie Nights was still a long way off and it was obvious by Cop and a Half, his heydays were over.
You could say the same thing about Chuck Norris and his few movies. Let’s face it. He was never a good actor. Most of his movies were mostly the cheap action B-movies that were heading toward the grey havens with the emergence of the home video market and the closure of independently-owned movie theaters.
But there were a few gems. Long Wolf McQuade is a Spaghetti-Western style modern action movie that pitted Norris against David Carradine. It was like Heat or Copshop of the early 1980s. But it doesn’t take itself too seriously as Norris plays a rogue Texas Ranger J.J. McQuade tracking down an arms dealer played by Carradine.
Then there was 1986’s The Delta Force, which plays like a cross between Rambo meets Airport. It’s almost more of pro-Reaganeighties fan fiction of the TWA Flight 847 hijacking with a happier ending despite the extreme Islamophobia and casting of Robert Forster as a Middle-Eastern terrorist. It became famous for the last movie to star Lee Marvin who by the mid-1980s whose health was failing and its evident on screen.
In between these two movies, he made Code of Silence, a gritty neo-noir action thriller that mixes police corruption social commentary with gangland warfare as Norris plays Chicago Police Sgt. Eddie Cusack who gets in the middle of a gang war between the Italian Mafia and Colombians. The crazy part is that it works considering the movie is only about 100 minutes with credits.
Part of the reason is that it was produced and released through Orion Pictures and not the Cannon Group, an independent studio, that notoriously made a lot of bad movies including several of which were Norris’. Code is also directed by Andrew Davis, who would go on to make Under Siege and The Fugitive. Davis grew up in and around Chicago. He knows the terrain. He knows the attitude of blue-collar cops trying to stay alive but also trying not to step on too many toes within their own department.
Davis also casts former CPD officers Dennis Farina and Joseph F. Kosala as Cusack’s colleagues Dorato and Kobas, respectively. And he fills the rest of the movie with many Chicagoland faces such as Ralph Foody, who plays the aging (and boozing) Det. Cragie who fatally shoots a Hispanic teenager by accident and then plants a gun on him. You may recognize Foody from the first two Home Alone movies as the mobster from the fake gangster movies Macaulay Culkin’s character watches. Foody spoke the famous line “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!”
A young detective Nick Kopalas (Joe Guzaldo) who was working with Cragie witnesses the whole incident but refuses to tell Cusack the truth. However, Cusack feels both Cragie and Kopalas are lying as he’s their immediate supervisor and requests a hearing upon the objection of many people in his precinct.
At the same time, Cusack is trying to protect Diana Luna (Molly Hagen), the young daughter of mobster Anthony “Crazy Tony” Luna (Mike Genovese), who foiled a drug sting of the Colombians which led to Cragie’s shooting the teenager. Tony skips town as the Mafia bosses want him to answer and the Colombians under Luis Comacho (Henry Silva) put the heat on the Luna family to draw Tony back into the city.
The movie works because Davis reins in a lot of what people might expect from Norris. He only uses his martial arts during a crucial scene. As Orion at the time was known to give filmmakers more liberties, the script also keeps Cusack from developing a love interest with Diana as other movies would have. This a good move considering Norris was 21 years older than Hagan.
The movie has a lot of comedy during the thrills as Cusack nonchalantly walks by some people doing cocaine at an art exhibit to call in a stake-out as they scramble not knowing what to do. Or there’s a hilarious scene of two petty criminals trying to hold up a local bar where all the cops hang out and they are made from the second they step in. This was reportedly inspired by a true incident. And Dorato is constantly coming up with get-rich schemes he and Cusack can do after retirement only for Cusack to find immediate faults.
In the end when Cusack uses a robotic machine called The Prowler to take down the Comacho gang, it doesn’t seem as hokey as it would in other movies. The movie up to here gives Cusack a reason to use this device because he finds himself unable to get much back-up because of the way he wants Cragie off the force.
The movie received some good reviews, most notably from Roger Ebert who praised it over his other movie, Invasion U.S.A. Norris who died on Thursday, March 19, must’ve realized he only had a limited time to keep making these action movies in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, they had gone mostly out of popularity in part due to the end of the Cold War. And most of his more family friendly movies (Firewalker, Sidekicks and Top Dog) seemed like cheaper knockoffs of Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Karate Kid and Turner & Hooch, respectively.
That’s pretty much why Walker, Texas Ranger helped him make bank because there was still an audience who didn’t always go to the movies but would tune in on the TV. Unfortunately for Norris, he let his political beliefs get the best of him.
While one would expect him to be standing behind Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in 2008, he went off the deep-end four years later against President Barack Obama. A person can be credited of a President’s policies, but Norris was part of the ChristoFascist Nationalism wing of the TEA Party that would lead to Trumpism. He also said that the Democrat Party had gone too far left, which any Gen Xer in the South knows that it means they believed more in Civil Rights for all.
At the time of The Expendables 2, most of his co-stars (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis) kept their politics at a certain level, Norris went on to say the re-election of Obama would lead to 1,000 years of darkness.
It became apparent that even though Norris might have trained with Bruce Lee, he lacked the philosophy behind martial arts. A lot of his movies were outrageously violent flowing with overt jingoism and even unforgivable violence toward women. And yet, he claimed he was a Christian. It’s obvious he never cared about East Asian philosophies and religions.
Away from the Internet memes and commercials, he became just another old man yelling at the clouds. He didn’t die the hero. Instead he lived longer to see himself become the villain. But in this case, it was his own doing.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 