Being a one-man army who can kill eighty-seven guys at once isn’t as great as it sounds. There’s always somebody who wants you, or your loved ones, dead. Your shirts are always getting soaked with blood and sweat (best to just avoid wearing shirts altogether, most of these guys decide eventually). Also you can expect frequent scrapes with the law on, like, a daily basis.
Such is life for this film’s John Steele, a hard-drinking beefcake in El Lay who’s never quite adjusted to polite society after a stint in ‘Nam. Martin Kove, best known as the evil martial arts instructor from The Karate Kid, is the lead and he makes a serious play for action movie stardom. Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Norris better watch their backs. Kove’s got his intense stare down, he can deliver wisecracks and he can even be sensitive when he’s not machine-gunning Vietnamese drug runners in office building lobbies. When things are at a low point for him and we see him brood shirtless on a swing set with a pink sweater loosely knotted around his neck, we know Kove is really going for the gold.
Steele is your regular freewheeling loose cannon, always good for delivering a punch to the jaw or a shotgun blast when faced with an injustice, and though he’s not a cop (he works for the Bureau of Wild Horse Management–because, you see, he’s like a wild horse himself), his old war buddy is. The friend (Robert Kim) is one of the top guys in the LAPD’s “Asian Crime Task Force” (Oh, the 80s) and it’s not long before he’s murdered by Asian criminals. Drug cartel guys.
Do I even have to tell you that John Steele is now on a revenge mission? Do I have to tell you that he’s got about 152 guns, 68 knives, 47 grenades, a few bandoliers and some facepaint? Do I have to tell you that he crashes his truck through a storefront window at one point? Probably not. So I won’t.
The police grudgingly work with him (“You don’t recruit John Steele, you unleash him“, says cop boss Ronny Cox), which is how this film sneaks in those mandatory 80s scenes of exasperated police captains.
Other hallmarks of the time found here: drum machines galore, cheesy rock anthems from acts you’ve never heard of and a full-on music video scene because Steele’s ex-wife (though we know they’re gonna get back together), played by Sela Ward, is a director working on a clip for a slick lady rock singer, complete with leotard-clad dancers, that eventually gets interrupted by death and gunfire.
And what’s Shannon Tweed doing here? I guess the producers felt that this film wasn’t complete without a woman who flounces around in a few bathing suits so they shoehorned her in there as some kind of lady gangster, really high up on the totem pole, who enjoys wine, boats and swimming pools. I honestly don’t completely understand what her character is supposed to be, but after seeing her in that one bikini that’s about the size of fifty cents worth of postage stamps, I don’t care. She’s perfectly fine.
We’re talkin’ a real 80s overdose here. Show some respect and wear something pastel-colored when you watch it.