LONE WOLF MCQUADE: How’d You Like to Bite That in the Butt, Develop Lockjaw, and Be Dragged to Death?

Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) – Directed by Steve Carver – Starring Chuck Norris, David Carradine, Robert Beltran, Barbara Carrera, Leon Isaac Kennedy, L.Q. Jones, and William Sanderson.

Even though I’m reviewing LONE WOLF MCQUADE as part of Western Month, it’s not a Western in the classical sense. Instead, MCQUADE is a contemporary Western-slash-martial arts-movie-slash-standard-’80s-action movie. Director Steve Carver soaks his film with a Western score that might as well have been taken directly from an Ennio Morricone compilation, and the end result is a mildly effective mix of genres.

I mean, look, it’s an awful movie in a traditional sense, but it’s not an awful Chuck Norris movie, and it’s the film that inspired Norris to make Walker, Texas Ranger, so we owe/”owe” it that.

I’m being honest when I say that I just don’t get the appeal of Chuck Norris. He has no personality, he’s a terrible actor, and I don’t like or care enough about martial arts movies to know if he’s really any good at the punching and kicking. He is perhaps the most unintentionally brilliant camp actor of all-time, but I don’t think 1983 audiences were going to his movie on that score, so I’ve chalked Norris’ appeal up to being something I just don’t understand.

Norris plays J.J. McQuade, a “lone wolf” Texas Ranger who doesn’t want to partner up with anyone – including his new partner, the Texas State Trooper Kayo Ramos (Robert Beltran). We know McQuade is a real American hero because when he attends a fancy event and they tell him they don’t have any domestic beer, he passes on the Heineken and Dos Equis. Had the Most Interesting Man in the World emerged at that moment to kick his ass, we might have had something.

But he doesn’t.

We know McQuade is a bad ass because he drives a dirty Dodge truck that, for some unspoken reason, is a super truck. It’s got some crazy boost system that allows him to rocket down the highway. He gets buried inside the truck deep in the movie and after he pours beer on himself to wake himself up after getting the crap kicked out of him, drives the truck out of the ditch.

Where, let me repeat, he was buried. Under dirt. God F*cking Bless America.

We also know he’s a bad-ass because he lives in a crummy, ramshackle house outside of the city with a wolf.

Yep. With a wolf.

You also know he’s a bad ass because he shows up to a retirement ceremony all dirty from his latest bust and proceeds to take a nap. And hiss boss hates him because McQuade doesn’t fit his idea of what a Ranger “should look like,” and we know from every cop movie ever made that if your boss hates you, you are totally awesome.

The film doesn’t just want McQuade to be an All-American Bad Ass, however; it wants McQuade to have feelings. He loves his daughter (they even share an awkward lip-to-lip kiss), and she loves him, proving he’s a good dad. Even though he’s divorced from his wife, they’re still friendly, proving he’s a good divorcee. He takes his daughter horseback riding, where he ogles Barbara Carrera, and then he just leaves with the new hottie, apparently abandoning his daughter at the track, which proves he can be a bad dad, but an understandable man. When the bad guys kill his wolf, McQuade is so overcome with grief that he pounds his fist into the dirt, then picks the dead dog up.

The bad guy is David Carradine. He has a name (it’s Rawley) but names aren’t really important in a film like this because you spend the whole movie waiting for Norris and Carradine to fight. Carradine is wonderfully awful as the would be kingpin who’s also really good at martial arts. He also has a personalized license plate that reads, I sh*t you not, “CARATE.” He’s making it with his ex-partner’s widow, Lola (Barbara Carrera), who’s the movie’s eye candy and leads to the best line of the movie. McQuade’s best pal in the Rangers is the just-retired Dakota (L.Q. Jones), and they’re watching Lola ride a horse. Dakota asks McQuade: “How’d you like to bite that in the butt, develop lockjaw, and be dragged to your death?”

McQuade apparently thinks this sounds like fun because he grins. I think it sounds awful. (What if she’s a farter? Do you really want to die with your mouth clamped onto someone’s ass cheeks?) Lola and McQuade end up spending time together, but when McQuade comes home to find Lola cleaning up his sh*thole house, and then discovers she threw away his beer and replaced it with vegetables, McQuade flips his lid. “You’re killing yourself!” she wails after he tells her, “If I wanted my house clean, I’d get a maid!”

Right, because a maid would be better than Barbara Carrera.

And let’s be honest. I might not understand the appeal of Chuck Norris, but he walks around with his shirt off quite a bit and he doesn’t look like a guy letting himself go. If he’s living on a diet of cheap beer and kicking bad guys teeth in, then I’d say it’s working.

McQuade’s daughter ends up getting kidnapped and that leads to a big fight and it looks like Norris is appropriately taking this as the most important thing EVAH. In contrast, Carradine looks like he’s ready to hang out and smoke lots of weed; he’s just got to take care of this punk b*tch first.

They build up to a big fight scene and it’s really pretty average, but then, I don’t know much about martial arts so who knows if it’s actually good. It looks slow and clumsy to me, and Carradine looks silly wearing his yellow sweater and Norris looks silly in his bandanna and vest. His daughter gets shot in the leg, which inspires him to go kick ass, and then Carradine backhands her and that inspires McQuade to overcome his injuries to kick even more ass.

McQuade learns to team up with the FBI and state police, and they learn to let him kick ass.

Everybody wins. Except for maybe the audience.

BLADE RUNNER (THE FINAL CUT): Is There Anything Left to Say?

Blade Runner (1982): The Final Cut (2007) – Directed by Ridley Scott – Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, Joanna Cassidy, Edward James Olmos, Brion James, Joe Turkel, and M. Emmet Walsh.

I’d much rather write about a semi-forgotten movie like The Black Hole or a newer, “argument still in process” movie like Sucker Punch than an established classic like BLADE RUNNER, where it feels like everyone has already had the discussion, settled on their opinions, and left to talk about something else.

It’s not that I think I’m changing anyone’s mind with these reviews, but rather that I feel like there’s nothing much left to say about a movie that has been so widely seen and written about that this is just another log on the “BLADE RUNNER is awesome pile.”

BLADE RUNNER is Ridley Scott’s dystopian vision of 2019 Los Angeles. Based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, BLADE RUNNER is a rain-soaked, dark, noir thriller. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a worn down “Blade Runner,” a special cop who hunts down replicants and “retires” them, which is code for “blasts the sh*t out of them until they die.” Replicants are replicants that look like humans but are banned from use on Earth; they’re manufactured for off-world functions, such as menial labor and sex. If a replicant finds itself on Earth, a Blade Runner is sent after it, and when that happens, we have a movie.

BLADE RUNNER works on every level: story, direction, acting, tone, pace … I could have done without the Vangelis score but it’s not obtrusive. The first half of the film is successful primarily because of the tone and the latter half is successful because of story, as Deckard’s body count rises and his attitude towards replicants shifts.

I don’t like “last job” stories, but BLADE RUNNER succeeds in telling a last job story because Deckard has already checked out of this life, and when he’s then pulled back in by his boss (M. Emmet Walsh) his reluctance is reinforced by his experience with the replicants. This isn’t just one of those “I want to quit” stories but rather, “I need to quit,” and that need is soaked onto Ford’s face in every scene of the film. (And, let’s be honest, the dour Deckard seems much more like the Harrison Ford we see in interviews than Han or Indy ever did; Ford was born to play this part.) When he falls for Rachael (Sean Young), it’s not so much that his love for her changes him as much as his desire for her reveals his already changing attitude. While Deckard goes out and does his job, killing the escaped replicant Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), and then being saved by Rachael from being killed by Leon (Brion James), he’s already fallen for Rachael. His bedding of Rachael comes off as less about Deckard wanting Rachael as it does Deckard struggling with his attitude towards replicants.

Ridley Scott has deftly taken the detective noir and transposed it onto a sci-fi story. BLADE RUNNER uses the noir for its structure, and the sci-fi for its philosophy, with the two genres colliding in the impressive visual look. Deckard is very much the beaten down cop/private eye who lives alone, drinks too much, and falls for the wrong woman. He’s the only guy who can do this job and he does it without joy, any desire he once had to retire replicants long gone. It’s only natural he falls for Rachael, the most advanced replicant he’s met, after it takes him nearly three times as many questions to out her as a replicant using the Voight-Kampff Test as it does a normal replicant.

The big question with Deckard, of course, is whether he’s a replicant or not. According to the Never Wrong, Ford wanted Deckard to be human while Scott wanted Deckard to be a replicant. I think the film is ambiguous to support either position, which means it’s really ambiguous enough to not support either position. Personally, I think the story, as presented in the Final Cut, actually supports the human position better; the key to Deckard being a replicant centers on the unicorn dream sequence, which is then reinforced by Gaff (Edward James Olmos) leaving a unicorn origami figure near his door at the end of the film when Deckard and Rachael take off together. On the other side, however, that’s not exactly rock solid evidence. We also have Deckard’s eyes – throughout the film, replicant’s eyes are shown to “glow” as a result of the way light reflects off of them. This never happens with Deckard.

I think the film wants to leave it ambiguous; certainly if Scott really wanted to enforce Deckard-as-replicant, he could have made it more clear, but he doesn’t. The ambiguity angle works with how the film ends, as the final confrontation between Roy (Rutger Hauer) and Deckard shows both the physical brutality the replicants are capable of, as well as their humanity, as he spends a good amount of time beating the crap out of Deckard and then saves the cop from falling to his death in order for Deckard to watch Roy’s four-year lifespan come to its programmed ending.

From a viewer’s standpoint, I think Human Deckard works better for how this story is constructed than Replicant Deckard. If Deckard is human, then his relationship with Rachael signifies hope that humanity will eventually come to see their creations as more than simple slaves. If Deckard is a replicant then his falling for Rachael symbolizes his own awakening as a machine realizing it’s a machine, and that’s not nearly as strong an ending because we’ve already seen a whole movie full of machines that realize they’re machines. I think if you want Deckard to be a replicant then it needs to be revealed and dealt with in the film itself, and not left to the imagination.

One of the joys in watching BLADE RUNNER is how great the individual performances are beyond Ford’s rock solid center. Rutger Hauer is phenomenal as Roy Batty, calculating and cold one moment, emotional and hot the next. Sean Young reminds you she can do more than act crazy in real life. Brion James and M. Emmet Walsh are their usual dependable selves, and Daryl Hannah is alluring in her cat-like seduction and manipulation of William Sanderson, one of my personal favorite actors.

BLADE RUNNER’s place as a cinematic classic is well-earned. Personally, I don’t think it’s as good as Ridley Scott’s Alien, but it is a damn fine movie in its own right.