By Geno McGahee
I’m a huge Chuck Norris fan. Sure, I could do without his WALKER, TEXAS RANGER, religious nonsense and that machine that makes you do the splits, but when he’s got the right script, he knows how to make it work. The list of quality movies he has been a part of is beyond impressive: MISSING IN ACTION, CODE OF SILENCE, INVASION USA, THE HERO AND THE TERROR, and the 1982 monster movie of sorts “SILENT RAGE.”
Now, I have forgiven the fact that Norris is wearing a cowboy hat. I hope I don’t offend any cowboys out there, but I really hate you guys. When I see a cowboy, I just don’t like it, but this is a Chuck Norris movie where the hat gets knocked off of his head with some regularity and in my mind, I just turn it into a ball cap.
We begin with an angry big guy, John Kirby (Brian Libby) with an axe killing a couple in a house. When Sheriff Stevens (Norris) shows up, he goes to battle with this guy and he has a tough fight. The guy can take a punch and seems crazy and that is because he is. Don’t worry Norris fans…Chuck comes through and handcuffs the big man and puts him in the back of his cop car. Amazingly, this killer breaks through the handcuffs and then kicks the door right off of the cruiser, but the police have the answer. They unload on him with all sorts of guns. A shotgun blast sends the killer reeling and it is game over.
Dr. Halman (Ron Silver) assures Norris that the big guy is dead but I don’t trust Halman. He’s the same bad guy from TIMECOP and you remember how he fucked over Jean Claude Van Damme. He’s pretty shady, but his sister Allison (Toni Kalem) hooks up with Norris. He looked ready to break out that splits machine immediately but that usually is reserved for the second date.
Before I go any further, I want to note that I hate the character “Charlie” played by Stephen Furst. Charlie is the deputy to Norris and he is there for comic relief but he immediately takes away from the movie. He is unfunny and useless. Do you really think that Chuck Norris would take some fat fuck idiot as his sidekick? He would have beaten this guy and walked him down the street making him say: “I’m Norris’s bitch” over and over again and then he would beat him to death. Instead, we get this Charlie lingering on throughout the movie.
Just to show how great of a fighter Norris is, he takes on an entire bar full of bikers, but before he fights, he sends Charlie out to call for back up. Instead, this fat pig gets on the radio and starts talking about one of the biker chicks, while Norris is getting his ass handed to him. It’s frustrating. Why did they put this Charlie fuck into this? WHY!
Did I mention that along with cowboys, I’m not a fan of bikers either. Those two gimmicks or themes are unnecessary. The only men that should be wearing leather are sexual deviants. Now, I will say that these bikers believed in a fair fight. They attacked Norris one at a time and that’s how he was so successful.
To my surprise, Dr. Halman turned out to be an OK guy. It was his partner, Dr. Phil (Steven Keats) that is the dick head. He has kept the killer alive and is pumping him full of an experimental drug that will make him heal immediately and strong, but it also takes away his rationale and makes him violent. As I watched this develop, I began to think that this killer and Norris would eventually duke it out again… it wouldn’t be much of a movie if they didn’t.
Because Dr. Phil desperately wants to prove that he’s a genius, he won’t allow anyone to stop his creation and he basically sends him after poor Dr. Halman and although Halman is good with a gun, he’s no Chuck Norris. What a great performance by Silver. He played dead really well and I was happy to see him in a good guy role. I wish Van Damme could see him in this. He would definitely have second thoughts about him, I’m sure.
A wonderful surprise is that the killer takes out Charlie and kills Dr. Phil too. There is only one more to go and that is Chuck Norris, but Norris knows how to deal with guys like John Kirby…but this proves to be his toughest fight of all time.
Norris does the following to Kirby: knocks him off of a building, hits him with a car, forces him to drive off of a cliff, blows up, catches on fire and then he throws him down a well. Normally, the knocking off a building thing ends it, but this guy has rage like none other!
Now, outside of Charlie, there is one thing that bothered me. When Norris body slams Kirby down the well, Kirby screams like a banshee the entire way down. Is he afraid of heights? If so, why didn’t he scream when he fell off the building? Perhaps he had flashbacks to the building drop and that is why he was screaming. Whatever the case, that drop down the well really scared him.
SILENT RAGE reminds me of a few movies. It has some of TERMINATOR’S feel, although it came out before, and has some of the HALLOWEEN magic, but it still stands alone. There isn’t much of a musical score here, but this is called “SILENT RAGE”, so maybe that is the point. Not to beat a dead horse here, but had they gotten rid of the Charlie character and just put a generic partner that walks around the crime scene eating a sandwich, I would have liked this a great deal more. Chuck Norris didn’t give his best performance here, but the action is still top notch and this is absolutely worth a watch. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 7.5/10
