Movie Review: Firewalker (1986)

Genre: Adventure  

Director: J. Lee Thompson  

Starring: Chuck Norris, Louis Gossett Jr., Melody Anderson, Will Sampson, John Rhys-Davies  

Running Time: 104 minutes  

Synopsis: Dim-witted adventurers Max and Leo (Chuck Norris and Louis Gossett Jr.) are hired by the mysterious Patricia (Melody Anderson) to find a gold treasure. Their search takes them to an Indian Reservation mountaintop where they find a magical dagger and meet Tall Eagle (Will Sampson). Next they travel to San Miguel, where they tangle with local bandits and are rescued by old ally Corky (John Rhys-Davies). All the while they are hunted by the evil El Coyote (Sonny Landham), an Aztec descendant seeking enormous power.

What Works Well: Melody Anderson brings strong-willed and capably likeable presence to Patricia.

What Does Not Work As Well: This is a low budget, low talent, exhaustingly awful Cannon Group production designed to cash in on Raiders Of The Lost Ark-type adventurism. The misguided attempt to wedge Chuck Norris' stoic persona into a talkative lighthearted action comedy is predictably catastrophic, and the support from more refined actors like Louis Gossett Jr., John Rhys-Davies, and Will Sampson is wasted on an inane script. With no coherent plot points, director J. Lee Thompson resorts to a series of uninspired set-pieces staged within cheap cardboard sets. 

Key Quote:

Patricia: What scares you, Max?

Max: Suits, alarm clocks, apartment buildings.

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Movie Review: Enemy Mine (1985)

A science fiction story of survival and emerging friendship, Enemy Mine contains good intentions but is hampered by a desperately poor script and gauche execution.

Late in the 21st century, humanity has united and is busy colonizing distant planets. An alien species known as Dracs is in their way, competing for the same resources. After an aerial dogfight, human pilot Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) and Drac pilot Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.) crash land on Fyrine IV, an uninhabited and dangerous planet.

The two men are initially hostile towards each other and Willis sets out to find and kill his foe. But they soon realize they are stranded in dangerous terrain, where the threats include subterranean monsters and severe meteor storms. They start cooperating to survive, learning each other's language and culture in the process.

Echoing other enemy-combatants-turn-friends films such as 1968's Hell In The Pacific, Enemy Mine sets out to explore themes of solidarity across living species, and the imperative to look past superficial differences to seek commonalities. The film metaphorically represents every conflict between humans, and by casting Louis Gossett Jr. as the alien and featuring a subplot of Dracs exploited as slaves by human interplanetary scavengers, the film does not stray far from a homegrown call for interracial harmony.

Despite all good intentions, director Wolfgang Petersen struggles to deliver an engaging experience. The alien planet landscapes and the overall special effects are questionable, border on amateurish and reek of a grade B production. Humans and Dracs need space suits in their own fighter spacecraft but can both breathe and survive just fine on the surface of Fyrine IV.

The Dracs are hermaphrodites, but otherwise remarkably human-like in many characteristics, including movement, sleeping, eating and temperature sensitivity. Jeriba (or Jerry, as Willis insists on calling him) is never convincing as anything other than Louis Gossett Jr in a rubbery suit not far removed from the Creature From The Black Lagoon.

Worse still is a script by Edward Khmara filled with stilted dialogue that was old on planet Earth in 1985, with not a hint of evolution neither in human thinking nor basic technology. Late in the 21st century, humans are apparently still using cliched 1980s language expressions and firing pistols with bullets at each other deep in space.

Dennis Quaid is horribly miscast, alternating beyond angry but dim pilot mode and aw-shucks good-old-boy mannerisms. Louis Gossett Jr fights through the layers of bad cosmetics to frequently rise above the material.

Enemy Mine advocates tolerance, but the message is delivered with awkward inelegance.

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Movie Review: An Officer And A Gentleman (1982)

A grand romance emerging from the hardship of military training and equally testing blue collar surroundings, An Officer And A Gentleman confirmed Richard Gere as a sensational heartthrob, and catapulted Debra Winger to stardom. Taylor Hackford directs a romantic drama rich with sub-texts related to personal ambition, military discipline, and the convolutions of relationships.

Zack Mayo (Gere), long neglected by his father (Robert Loggia), enlists in the Navy's Aviator Officer School in the Pugent Sound area of Washington State. The other candidates include Sid Worley (David Keith), Casey Seeger (Lisa Eilbacher) and Emiliano Della Serra (Tony Plana), and they are all soon battling through the hardship of the 13 week training program, guided by fierce drill sergeant Emil Foley (Louis Gossett, Jr.).

Mayo and Worley are class leaders and become friends. They meet two local girls who work at a nearby paper factory: Paula (Debra Winger) starts a friendship with Mayo that slowly but surely deepens into a relationship. Worley and Lynette (Lisa Blount) start with the sex and then explore the benefits of a friendship.

As the training progresses, Foley has to knock the traces of self-centred arrogance out of Mayo to turn him into an effective leader; Paula starts to wonder if she has invested too much into a man who will likely never see her again once he graduates; and Lynette ponders a plan to make sure that Worley does not leave her. Mayo uncovers some shaky foundations to Worley's determination to succeed, and these character flaws threaten the graduation prospects of both men. With the training coming to an end, Mayo, Worley, Paula and Lynette have to make the difficult choices that will determine their destinies.

It is rare for a romance to appeal equally to both sexes, but An Officer And A Gentleman successfully pushes all the right buttons for men and women. The glamour of overcoming the rigorous training regime and becoming a navy aviator resonates strongly with the male psyche. The local girl falling in love and being swept off her feet - literally, in this case - by the handsome prince (or officer in uniform, as the case may be) underpins every girl's childhood fantasy.

The script by Douglas Day Stewart weaves a simple modern day tale around the quest for man to become a warrior, and the quest for woman to secure a warrior for herself, and adds in a clever layer of demonstrated failure: anything that can go wrong does go wrong, and suddenly, in the relationship between Worley and Lynette. Not all men will become leaders, and not all women will succeed in finding a knight in shining armour.

Director Taylor Hackford, entering a peak personal era of delivering complex romances that would include Against All Odds, White Nights, and Everybody's All American, teases out five excellent performances out of his cast. Gere's Mayo displays a surprisingly respectful steely resolve to succeed, pushing aside his more rebellious nature to obey, for the most part, the punishing instructions of Foley. Winger plays the deceptively doe-eyed Paula with a tender spunkiness, her glamour downgraded to suit the local poor girl from a blue-collar family. Gere and Winger immediately find sizzling chemistry, culminating in a sex scene that has retained its crackling heat over the decades.

In support, Louis Gossett, Jr. won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his Gunnery Sergeant Foley, a role that would become indelibly associated with the actor. Mercilessly spitting nails and an endless stream of insults and profanities, Gossett brings a disciplined but manic intensity to the role of transforming wannabe fighter pilots into navy officers.

David Keith and Lisa Blount play a substantial role in the success of An Officer And A Gentleman, in secondary roles that refreshingly undergo their own compelling transformations. Keith's Worley is much less certain than Mayo about why he wants to be an officer, but it takes him a tragically long time to realize this. When he finally comes to terms with his life's decisions, he is in the clutches of unforeseen trouble. Blount, in the best role of her career, is haunting as she gradually reveals Lynette as the most dangerous obstacle facing the trainees: beneath the fun and frolicking, Lynette has a deadly serious and selfish objective.

With Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes belting out the spine-tingling Up Where We Belong as the romance between Mayo and Paula climaxes unforgettably on the factory floor in the final scene, An Officer And A Gentleman secures its place among Hollywood's greatest love stories.

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Movie Review: Iron Eagle (1986)

It is difficult to imagine a worse advertisement for the 1980s. Horrible hair. Horrible soundtrack of limp rock. Horrible script. Horrible performances by horrible actors. Horrible villain spouting horrible one-liners with a horrible accent. And the most horrible, jingoistic, Reagan-era cowboy mentality pretending to be a viable solution to a crisis.

Iron Eagle somehow passed for entertainment in 1986. It's the story of Doug (Jason Gedrick), the hot-headed teenaged son of Air Force pilot Ted Masters (Tim Thomerson). On a mission over the Mediterranean, Ted is shot down, captured, tried and sentenced to be executed by an enemy country (Libya, although never named). When the official U.S. response is timid, young Doug, who is a hotshot fighter pilot himself, partners with the grizzled and semi-retired Colonel "Chappy" Sinclair (Louis Gossett Jr.) to plan and launch the most unlikely of rescue missions. Doug and Chappy somehow arrange to steal a couple of F-16s, then they pull-off a couple of unauthorized mid-air refuelling manoeuvres, before they bomb the Libyans into submission, destroy their air force in a couple of dog-fights, rescue Tom, and jet home.

The U.S. Air Force showed unusually good judgement and mercifully refused to have anything to do with Iron Eagle due to the portrayal of a fighter jet theft, but that may have been just a most convenient excuse because surely even the Pentagon would have recognized the stench emanating from the fetid script.

Canadian director Sidney J. Furie has a chequered resume, and he did his reputation no favours by directing this embarrassment, plus several sequels. Louis Gossett Jr. chews through his lines looking for nothing but impact but finding only cartoon-level intensity. Jason Gedrick needs only a few minutes of screen time to prove that he is all hair and no talent, but unfortunately gets a lot more than a few minutes. The rest of the cast may as well have been drawn in with thick felt markers for all the nuance and texture that they bring to the movie.

Iron Eagle stands as a monument to the level of brainlessness that movies can descend to when catering to the lowest common denominator of dumb action and blind, revenge-driven so-called patriotism.

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