If you’re like me, Chuck Norris has forever debased the image of the Texas Ranger into a caricature of bearded empty-headed goofiness. How strange is it, then, to watch Extreme Prejudice and see Nick Nolte portray a Ranger with even less emotional range, and hit it out of the park.
Walter Hill, director of such manly classics as 48 HRS., The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, is not known for subtlety of characterization. He deals in black-and-white archetypes of mandom, shades of gray rarely necessary. So it’s no surprise that Nolte’s Ranger is good, Powers Boothe is evil (he crushes scorpions between his fingers, for Christ’s sake), and we’re never in doubt that Nolte will get the girl (The Running Man‘s Maria Conchita Alonso, doing her best to convey some sort of character in a translucently thin role).
Luckily, there’s a subplot involving rogue mercenaries led by Michael Ironside to complicate things. Throw in the invaluable Clancy Brown, William Forsythe and Rip Torn; coat everyone in record amounts of perspiration; and climax with a straight-up bullet-ridden homage to The Wild Bunch (if you must steal, steal from the best), and you’ve got a testosterone-fueled, underrated ’80s actioner that The Expendables could only dream of replicating.
Leading it all, the oak tree that is Nolte in his glorious physical prime, running on one emotion and one facial expression and overpowering everything in his path. There may be another fist beneath Norris’ beard, but beneath Nolte’s mustache? Chuck Norris, weeping like the little girl he really is. —Corey Redekop
Thank you for this.
“Who you calling uncouth? I couth as hell.”