Chuck Norris, 86, passed yesterday (Thursday, 3.19) in Hawaii. Respect, regrets and condolences to his mostly conservative-minded fans (including Mike Huckabee), colleagues and loved ones, but I have to deliver my thoughts honestly…straight from the shoulder.
An arch-conservative and an Orange County Christian, Norris certainly became a brand in the Reagan years, and he held his own, commercially and culturally, throughout the ’90s, aughts and teens.
But in the realm of iconic big-screen tough guys of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s Norris wasn’t in the class of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, much less Clint Eastwood. He was in the class of Jason Statham, or more precisely Statham, who ascended in the aughts and became big in the 20teens, aspired to be Norris-like.
Like Norris, Staham has made his bones as the star of a string of mostly forgettable, formulaic action programmers, and yet he surpassed Norris 18 years ago when he finally made one good film — Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job (’08). Norris, alas, never made a Bank Job-level film…not one. Everything he starred in was B-grade junk…crap, crap, crap….Lone Wolf McQuade, Missing in Action, Code of Silence, Invasion U.S.A., The Delta Force. Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus loved the guy, and I worked in Cannon publicity in ’87 and ’88 so don’t tell me.
If Norris had made one half-decent hardboiled film…something with the edge and restraint of like John Flynn‘s The Outfit, say…I would have some respect for him. But he was always a Walmart guy.