Hollywood Tough Guys

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Boxing, TV brothers, Chuck Norris, and a friendless friend.

STREETS OF GOLD (1986)

The opening title sequence of the 1986 sports drama Streets of Gold begins with the name Klaus Maria Brandauer filling the screen, spelled out in large font. It’s “Klaus Maria Brandauer in Streets of Gold,” pushing Brandauer as a major selling point... which it never would be for me, especially since I’m mainly familiar with Brandauer for being a slimy little weasel in the 1983 James Bond movie Never Say Never Again. Brandauer does have a lot of fans, though. He was apparently a big star in his native Austria, and even earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in the 1985 film Out of Africa. To me he’ll always be that little weasel from Never Say Never Again, but he does do a good job playing the lead character in this film.

That character is Russian former boxer Alek Neuman, whose dream of fighting on the Russian national boxing team was dashed by a coach who refused to let him on the team because he’s Jewish. So Alek broke the man’s nose. Now, Alek has moved to the United States and looks to spend his days working as a dishwasher and his evenings getting so drunk that he ends up sleeping on the beach of Coney Island.

Alek’s fortunes start to change early on, when he stumbles into an underground fight club and sees boxers Timmy Boyle (Adrian Pasdar) and Roland Jenkins (Wesley Snipes) do their thing. Timmy is impressed when Alek challenges Roland to hit him and then manages to evade all of the younger, faster man’s swings, so he asks the burn-out to show him the ropes. Alek can, of course, be a difficult person to deal with, but soon enough he’s training both Timmy and Roland – and yes, this is all building toward a boxing match between an Alek-trained American and a Russian fighter trained by the coach who killed Alek’s dreams.

Directed by Joe Roth from a script crafted by Heywood Gould, Richard Price, Tom Cole, and Dezsö Magyar, Streets of Gold is an interesting movie that gets through its story of boxing and redemption in less than 88 minutes. While I often appreciate a shorter running time, in this case it felt like the movie might have had a chance to be more effective if the story and characters had been given more time to breathe. As it is, it ends up feeling a bit like a halfhearted attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Rocky movies. It works, but it could have been better.

It also could have been more satisfying if the Roland Jenkins side of the story had been handled in a better way. Although Snipes, in one of his earliest acting roles, was already demonstrating star power, the script stumbles when it comes to Roland and even holds him back from the climactic boxing action.

A movie that could have been pretty cool ended up being just fine.

AMERICAN JUSTICE (1986)

‘80s aficionados, and those of us who were there for (at least part of) the decade, will remember that Gerald McRaney and Jameson Parker shared the screen for eight seasons of the TV series Simon & Simon, where they played brothers who ran a private detective agency. The show ran from 1981 to the last day of 1988 – and one piece of trivia that has slipped into obscurity over the decades is the fact that, in the midst of their Simon & Simon run, McRaney and Parker also made a movie together: the 1986 action thriller American Justice... which may have been helped on its descent into obscurity by confusion over the title, as the movie is also known as Jackals.

Directed by Gary Grillo, who was a first A.D. on Simon & Simon and also directed a few episodes, from a script by Dennis A. Pratt, who had acting roles on some episodes of Simon & Simon and also went on to write Kickboxer 3 and Leprechaun 4, among other credits, this movie sees McRaney and Parker playing police officers who work in a small American town on the edge of the Mexican border. McRaney actually takes on a villainous role in this one, as his Deputy Jake Wheeler is part of a human trafficking ring that meets illegal aliens as they cross the border and force the women into prostitution. 

Jack Lucarelli plays Joe Case, a big city cop who’s visiting friends in this desert town – and while out in the countryside, he sees Wheeler execute a young Mexican woman who escaped from his associates. Case knows Wheeler in the killer as soon as he sees the man in the police station, but there’s not much he can do when the killer is in a protected position and Sheriff Mitchell (Wilford Brimley) won’t believe his story. Parker’s character Dave Buchanon is a friend of Case’s who sports a laser-sighted shotgun and may be the only back-up he’ll get in this situation.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started watching American Justice, but since it’s so obscure, I thought I might be in for something low-rent and underwhelming. It’s actually a surprisingly well-made film, the only drawbacks being that it can feel slow at times and is also deathly serious. Most viewers turn to action movies to have a good time, but there’s not much fun to be found in this one. Even when action breaks out, as it does from time to time, it’s not fun. It’s still dark and serious, and sometimes devastating. Simon & Simon fans might be shocked, as McRaney's character is an irredeemable scumbag, but those who are looking for a dark, serious, tough-guy movie will find exactly what they want.

JOEY (2004 – 2006)

Blog contributor Priscilla has watched her way through the entire 10 season, 200+ episode run of the sitcom Friends multiple times. She convinced me to watch the whole series some years back – and since then, she and I have watched the whole run together a couple of times. And yet, despite the fact that she is a big Friends fan, she had never seen the spin-off series Joey... until I decided we should check it out last year.

With his friends having found happiness at the end of Friends, actor Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) decides to leave New York City behind and try his luck in Hollywood. He moves into an apartment there, but he’s not adrift alone in this new city because his sister Gina (Drea de Matteo) already lives in L.A. with his nephew Michael (Paulo Costanzo), who couldn’t be more different from his dimwitted uncle, who has always had great luck with the ladies. Michael is a genius who gets nervous around girls.

While in Hollywood, Joey gets a new agent, Jennifer Coolidge as Roberta "Bobbie" Morganstern, a woman who might be insane.

Joey’s next-door neighbor is Alex Garrett (Andrea Anders), a lawyer who also happens to be the apartment complex’s landlady. Throughout the first season of the show, there’s a “will they or won’t they” situation between Joey and Alex, as they clearly have an interest in each other... but she happens to be married. Her husband isn’t around very much and isn’t a great guy when he is, so it’s only a matter of time before Joey and Alex take their friendship to the next level. Her separation does eventually come, Joey and Alex do hook up – but the show does the Alex character a great disservice in the second season, which she spends pining over Joey and acting like a fool.

Just like the show introduces Alex as one type of character and then starts having her act like another type of character, Joey as a whole never seemed to figure out exactly what sort of show it should be. The “Joey and Alex” element of the show is at its best in the first season. The “Joey’s career” side of things is at its best in the second season, when Joey befriends a fellow actor named Zach Miller (Miguel A. Núñez Jr.). Zach was a great addition to the ensemble – and the show couldn’t even keep that in place, because Núñez found a job and left before the second season was over.

Further dragging things down in season 2 is the arrival of Adam Goldberg as Gina’s ex and baby daddy Jimmy. I like Goldberg, I’ve been a fan of his since Dazed and Confused and enjoyed his appearance (as a character named Eddie) on Friends – but the temperamental Jimmy is an incredibly annoying character who really tests the viewer’s patience.

Friends was one of the biggest sitcoms of all time. Joey got cancelled after just two seasons and 46 episodes – and NBC even went so far as to pull the show off the air before all of the episodes had even aired. I don’t think Joey was a terrible show at all. It was fun. It just never quite seemed to find its feet and figure out what it should be, so it fell short of its potential. It was nice to get to spend some extra time with Joey.

As for what Priscilla thought; she agrees that the show was fun, but it also confirmed her suspicion that a show about a friend on their own just couldn’t be fully satisfying. Friends worked because of the ensemble. The friends need each other.

AN EYE FOR AN EYE (1981)

In my previous Chuck Norris movie write-up, I pointed out that each Norris movie seemed to be even better than the one that came before. Good Guys Wear Black was a step up from Breaker! Breaker!, A Force of One was better than that, and The Octagon was better than that. I wondered if the pattern would hold... but the truth is, The Octagon was a really tough act to follow. It had Norris fighting his way through a terrorist camp full of ninjas! So it’s not surprising that I didn’t enjoy An Eye for an Eye more than that one – but, I would say that it was around the same level of quality. That one just had a bunch of ninjas, and this one didn’t.

Directed by Steve Carver from a script by James Bruner and William Gray, An Eye for an Eye stars Norris as San Francisco narcotics cop Sean Kane, whose partner Dave Pierce (Terry Kiser) is killed in a fiery ambush in the opening sequence. Determined to avenge his friend and not wanting to deal with the grief his Captain (Richard Roundtree) is giving him for knocking one of the perpetrators through a window that was multiple stories from the ground, Kane turns in his gun and badge and carries out his own investigation.

Also on the case is Dave’s girlfriend, TV reporter Linda Chan (Rosalind Chao) – and when she digs up too much information on the drug dealers responsible for Dave’s death, she gets murdered by a hulking henchman called The Professor (Professor Toru Tanaka). Now, not only is Kane pissed off about this situation, but so is the man who got him into martial arts, Linda’s father James (Mako). You’re really screwed when you have both Chuck Norris and Mako on your trail.

Just because Kane is out for revenge and having to knock his way through a bunch of henchmen and hitmen doesn’t mean he can’t take some time to find love, so he hooks up with Linda’s friend and fellow newsroom employee Heather Sullivan (Maggie Cooper), who helps him get the information he needs to find the head of this drug operation. Luckily for the filmmakers, they were able to find a villain who feels formidable even when faced with the vengeful duo of Norris and Mako: the main bad guy here is played by the great Christopher Lee! For some viewers, the presence of Lee might even be enough to raise this one about the ninja-packed The Octagon.

An Eye for an Eye may not be my favorite Chuck Norris movie so far, but it is a really good action flick – and it was followed by one of my favorite Norris movies, the awesome Lone Wolf McQuade.