In 1977, Chuck Norris' career was at a turning point. Kickboxing champ Benny “The Jet” Urquidez – who would later have
a memorable bout with Jackie Chan in “Wheels on Meals” – reached out to him about starting
a new professional fighting league. At the same time, “Breaker! Breaker!” was about to come out and potentially launch a proper film career for Norris. Obviously, Chuck went with the latter option and he pursued it seriously. He had a hand in conceiving the story for his next movie, “
Good Guys Wear Black.” He sought out producers for the film personally, banking on his karate cred. When a distributor couldn't be secured, the producers four-walled the movie themselves and
Chuck promoted it heavily. The strategy worked. The film grossed 18 million against its small budget and set Chuck up for a very busy eighties. A perhaps more important question remains though: Is the movie any good?
During the waning days of the Vietnam War, John T. Booker would lead a team of CIA-backed commandos known as the Black Tigers. Their final mission was to go behind enemy lines and bust American POWs out of a prison camp. The mission goes badly, all but four members of the team are killed, and no helicopter arrives to pull Booker and the boys out. This was the work of Senator Conrad Morgan, part of a sketchy negotiation to end the war. Five years later, Booker and the other guys are in the U.S. and trying to move on with their lives. A female reporter named Margaret reaches out to him and clearly has secret information about the Black Tigers and their botched mission. At the same time, someone is hunting down and killing the remaining members of Booker's team. He sets out on a journey across the U.S., uncertain of Margaret's loyalties but keeping her close-by, and tries to rescue his teammates before the killer finds them.
Looking at how the American mass consciousness processed the Vietnam War through our pulpiest pulp fiction is fascinating. By the time “Rambo: First Blood Part II” had come out in 1985, the narrative that neither the American armed forces nor capitalism were beaten but were instead let down by politicians in D.C. was firmly established. The war had only been over for five years by the time “Good Guys Wear Black” came out but it features almost this same attitude. The machine gun wielding soldiers sent overseas to kill, who did so without question, certainly weren't wrong. They're heroes, by gum! Instead, they were failed by a deliberate conspiracy within Washington to get the war over with, who only cared about their own popularity and power and not the lives lost. Chuck's character is a political science professor in his day job and admits during a lecture that the war in Vietnam was a mistake, that the U.S. never should've been involved. This feels like a weird half-way point to the Reagan era's full-bore revisionism, when brawny super-soldiers were allowed to
retroactively win the war. It's a half-hearted admission that, yes, the Vietnam War was wrong. John T. Booker and his team of black-clad super secret assassins are the good guys though. The title says so! You can root for him. Don't think about
what the CIA was doing in Vietnam.
Despite possibly containing some insight into how All-American types compartmentalized the Vietnam War, “Good Guys Wear Black” unfortunately is not actually about that. It simply uses the war as background for its hero and villain, as a motivating factor for why Chuck Norris is awesome and why somebody wants him and his buddies dead. Instead, the film is trying to be a conspiracy thriller of sorts. It has Booker traveling the country, looking over his shoulders for possible attackers, being paranoid at airports and in parking lots. There are repeated scenes of Booker being met by Lloyd Haynes in offices, while the latter stares at terse read-outs on computer screens. While the film is clearly trying to build tension over who is doing these killings and why, any suspense is wasted by the very first scene. That depicts Senator Morgan explaining his plan to screw over the Black Tigers and his reasoning why. Kind of deludes the mystery when the movie informs us right from the get-go who ordered the screw job and why!
On one level, I suspect screenwriters Bruce Cohn and Mark Medoff –
the esteemed playwright of “When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?” and “Children of a Lesser God,” who must've needed a paycheck – were aware that the film shoots itself in the foot from the get-go. There is an attempt to create tension with another story element. When Anne Archer first meets Chuck, she immediately begins asking him about the black ops. shit he did during the war. That is clearly suspicious and Booker is rightly uncertain of her loyalties. (Though not, in the proud tradition of James Bond, enough to turn down sleeping with her.) This angle is repeatedly brought up by Norris sneering at Archer about who she is and what she actually wants. That's some weird spy movie version of your classical romantic subplot, built on whether these two will end up together. With the question of “they might not,” being followed by “because she's a CIA spook out to kill him.” While Chuck was not without his charms, they are not on-display here. He has little chemistry with Archer, the romance never materializing over the improbability of these two having much interaction at all. I feel like a former special forces guy would not humor any questions about his secret missions, not even from an attractive woman.
While Norris himself was a driving force on “Good Guys Wear Black,” the film seems to misunderstand his appeal some. Out of everything I've mentioned in this review, have you noticed what hasn't come up much? The kicking and the punching, what we're here to see this karate champ do. “Good Guys Wear Black” does have some strong action scenes. There's a decent fight outside an airport and another that ends with Chuck jump kicking through a car's windshield, probably the highlight of the entire film. Aside from a overly dark opening raid in Vietnam, a punch isn't thrown until an hour into the movie though. The climax is not a one-and-one fight between the hero and villain but instead a terse conversation in a car. I'm sure Norris was eager to prove he could do more than just fight but “Good Guys Wear Black” deliberately turning away from his strengths is a baffling choice.
While “Good Guys Wear Black” is disappointingly short on fisticuffs, it does have a weirdly stacked cast of recognizable character actors. Haynes brings some mild authority to a thankless part. Dana Andrews pops in as a foppish government director who goes out in a silk bathrobe while swilling Scotch. Maybe the most unexpected name in the credits is Jim Backus, Mr. Howell himself, who gets surprisingly high billing despite playing a comedic hotel doorman in one sequence. Another
former Bruce Lee co-star, James Franciscus, plays the scheming senator. He does fine in the role, better than he did filling in Charlton Heston in director Ted Post's earlier “
Beneath the Planet of the Apes.” Little of the eccentricity of that film or “
The Baby” are on display here, the action scenes being flatly shot and most of the movie looking like a TV cop drama. Though this is the second Chuck Norris movie in a row to feature a Faulkerian man-child, which is unexpected. Weirdly, he's one of the Black Tigers, which seems to say something about the CIA's qualifications for a black operations team. “Good Guys Wear Black” made money and Chuck credits this one for truly launching his career but I found it to be a misconceived snooze.
[5/10][THE CHUCK OF NORRIS: 4 outta 5]
[X] Facial Hair
[X] Jumps or Kicks Through a Window or Wall
[X] Performs Spin Kick or Spin Punch to Enemy's Face
[X] Shows Off His Hairy Chest
[] Sports Some Cowboy Getup
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