In honor of the passing of His Hairiest of Chestinesses, I was asked to review this long-forgotten masterpiece, and this, of course, can only be done in the classic 80s Action format. So, here’s to you, Mr. Norris. May thee live forever, good sir.
Tagline:
Eddie Cusack’s a good cop having a very bad day.
Entire Story In Fewer Words Than Are In This Sentence:
Eastwood wouldn’t; Chuck’s cheaper.
Homoeroticism:
Well, it’s a movie with the King of Bear(d)s, so… But other than the fact that any film featuring Sir Chucks-a-lot is, by its very nature, the gayest, not all that overt, really. Throughout the movie there is only one scene in which we, the viewer, are regaled with all of his curly, sweaty, gleaming gloriousness. One! Boo! There is, of course, zero mention of any sort of (female or otherwise) partner in the sparse and stoic life of the one straight cop in an otherwise rotten Chicago police force. At one point, one of the baddies informs our hero that his nickname on the street is “Stainless Steel.” Yes. So, no. Not so much.
That is, however, until we meet his unwilling partner, Nick Kopalas (Joe Guzaldo). (“I don’t have time to work in a rookie! I work alone…” Yes, we know, Chuckster. Now take your shirt off.) He gets assigned to our beloved plank-of-wood-that-acts and… well, he falls, hard. Only a few days into their partnership, riding through town in a rusted-out, ten-year-old flat grey Firebird, we get this bizarre little scene: Kopalas on the phone in their cop bar hangout, calling Norrissimo, trying to get him to have a beer… and also, because (drunk smile fading) – “we have to talk,” in the exact tone of voice one reserves for a lifelong lover. His eyes welling up… And then, at the very end of the movie, you just have to see the look on his face as Lord Chestnuts rides off into the sunset… True love. True love, indeed.
Corpse Count:
A healthy 74 human beings get their lights snuffed out over the course of 1 hour and 40 minutes, 49 of which are from the hand of the Chuckalicious himself. Well, he and his robot. Yes. Did I not mention the robot? There’s a robot. I’ll get back to the robot. I will. I promise.
How bad is it really?
Hm. Well, now. On this, it seems, opinions differ. I’ve read some comments on IMDb from people saying that this was ‘a step up’ in the work of Beardy McRoundhouse, a foray, if you will, into a somewhat altogether more serious type of crime thriller. (Supposedly it was written as a potential fourth Dirty Harry installment.) And I thought, are we watching the same movie? Because what I saw was a very cheap-looking, bog-standard cop movie that exhausts every single cop movie cliché there is (up to and including a scene in which two lowlifes decide to rob the cop bar), starring a Chest of Wool that, however delicious, never once strays from his “This is my face. It’s the only face I have.” – acting style. And cheap, yes! Darn! The whole thing looked like an average TV episode of Hill Street Blues.
That one scene in which Sir Chuckiness does take his shirt off takes place in the cop’s gym, which is located in the underground car park beneath the police station. And when I say ‘located,’ I mean it’s just sort of drawn out there on the concrete floor with some benches between parked police cars. I already mentioned Chuck’s rusted-out Firebird, but all the cars in the movie are tired old pieces of crap. And much of the movie consists of either sitting in them or riding around in them. At one point, and this I found particularly lame, our Texas Wrangler is seen speeding off to some emergency, and they don’t even give him one of those hilarious humongous slap-on-the-roof police lights! They just let him drive off with a cheap wee-huu sound effect. And I swear to god, during the final shootout (in an abandoned warehouse, yes!), our Keeper of Beardness hides from gunfire behind a stack of cardboard boxes! And you have just enough time to think, ‘Well, maybe they’re filled with bricks,’ before he starts throwing them! (To scare the bad guys away, maybe?) So, yes, cheap! And dumb! A mere 7 million dollars this apparently cost to make, and it really shows. Even the tagline is cheap. So, in my own not-so-modest opinion, yes. Pretty bad.
Was there a stupid chief?
No. I mean, of course there was a chief (Bert Remsen), but he isn’t all that stupid! Sure, he yells a lot at Chuckie Chan, but not once does he call him a loose cannon who at least gets results! Nor does he ask for his gun and badge when it’s all over! Just a lame (yet lovingly and soft-spoken) ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’ To which the Chuckinator replies with a nod. Of sorts. Yes. Of course he will. Dearest.
Novelty Deaths:
I promised you I would get back to the robot! The Prowler! Oh, yes, indeed! Introduced earlier on in the movie, it’s Chicago’s cutting-edge remote-controlled crowd control apparatus. Or, one of those six-wheeled ATVs with an upper body of plastic and plywood, and on top of that something that looks like it fell off the back of the Millennium Falcon, but which are, in fact, according to its own soothing woman’s voice, an M40 recoilless rifle, a pair of Mark 19 grenade launchers, and two .50 caliber heavy machine guns. Yes. (I particularly liked the ‘recoilless’. On a two-ton urban tank.)
This being the eighties, its ‘remote’ is the size of a kitchen appliance, but hey! It’s the future, man… (There’s this great scene in which the operator tries out the locking system on a leaving Chuckerino, after which the latter pulls his big-ass handgun and takes aim at him, making him stand, shiver and deliver.
Cops laughing all around… very funny.) At the end of the movie, when the most rotten of Chicago’s finest all but leave Kick-in-the-Groin to fight the evil drug lord and his army of henchmen alone, he steals it and uses it to take out half of them. At one point, one of the ‘grenade launchers’ fires something that looks very much like a firecracker, after which some baddy catches fire and falls off a platform into the harbor beneath. I laughed so hard I had to pause. So: being hit by a firecracker shot from a plywood robot controlled remotely by the world’s greatest beard. I’d call that novel. Yes.
Postmortem One-Liner:
None. None! Djeez! Even when shooting the evil drug lord himself (played by one of the go-to baddies of the eighties, the great face of Henry Silva), the Chuckness does nothing but stare blankly. Plankly. Not a word. Boo! (That final shot from Oil-r-us is shown in slow motion, for some reason. Only time they do that. Maybe it makes the baddies even deader.)
What you learned:
- Trying to rob a cop bar is a bad idea.
- Dennis Farina is also in this!
- That ‘Prowler’ is an acronym. It stands for ‘Programmable Robot With Logical Enemy Response.’ Yes.
- You can hide from gunfire behind cardboard boxes. And then throw them at bad guys.
- Ten to twelve men with automatic weapons firing at you simultaneously from a short range will not harm you in any way.
- When you testify against a fellow cop, all the other cops hate you. When you go out and save the girl (there’s a girl!) on your own, all the other cops will love you again.
- This is not a good movie.
Other Quotes and One-Liners:
- “If I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you.” -Eddie Cusack
Rest in Peace, Chuck Norris
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