'I Think You're Just Naturally Hostile'

Extreme Prejudice, where Nick Nolte holds one facial expression the entire film, a pissed off glare. We finished watching Poirot a week or so ago, and since then we'd been watching the Inspector Alleyn mysteries, which I've quite enjoyed. But Monday night, having finished one, my dad proclaimed that to be enough of British detective, it was time for some Amurican violence.

Which the movie delivers in spades. A restaurant is blown up with a bomb hidden inside a cute little bunny in the first 30 minutes. Not a child's stuffed toy, an actual, live rabbit. Here I thought between action flicks and comic books I'd seen every sort of violence conceivable, but I was left agape at that one.

Nolte plays a Texas Ranger named Jack whose childhood friend, Cash Bailey (Powers Boothe), has become a big time drug dealer in Mexico. Nolte is determined to stop him, but really doesn't want to kill Cash, and Cash doesn't want to kill Nolte, either. Plus, Nolte's current girlfriend Sarina (Maria Conchita Alonso), used to be Cash's girlfriend, and Nolte is (naturally) unable to tell her how he feels. Or speak of his emotions in any form whatsoever, really. You know how it is with these tough guys.

Into this comes Michael Ironside and his eltie squad (including Clancy Brown) of presumed dead soldiers, supposedly on a mission to shut down this drug ring. They initially try to keep undercover. As much as you can when you rob a drug dealer's safety deposit box in broad daylight because you distracted the cops by blowing up an abandoned warehouse with a tanker truck full of hydrogen. When their attempts to lay low fail, Ironside opts for the direct approach, offering to bring Nolte into Mexico with his team, and give him a chance to get Cash and Sarina first. But gee, Ironside sure seems to be sweating more than everyone else. . .

It's a very '80s action movie. Lots of machine gun fire hitting nothing, lots of tough talk, lots of explosions and quick cuts. I wish Boothe had been more consistent about whether Cash was going to refer himself in the third person or not. Personally, I was pro-third person for Cash Bailey, but just pick one or the other. At least he didn't use second person. Because of the sort of movie it is, there isn't much subtlety, which means that when Cash and Nolte are set to have an old-style faceoff, Cash must behave in a crude manner towards Sarina, to emphasize he's the wrong guy. I thought that was unnecessary. He's already a drug kingpin, who killed plenty on his rise to the top, and has killed more since then. But if he'd been kind to her, open with his feelings, it would have made a nice contrast to Nolte's character, who does the right thing, but is emotionally closed off, to the point we don't know how much he really cares about her. I mean, did he come to Mexico for her, or to bring Cash to justice?

I don't think it'll be a surprise that Cash dies The biggest of his surviving men agrees to let our heroes leave because hey, now he's in charge. At the very end we see him yelling at the other cannon fodder to get back, so he can take Cash's watch and hat. I thought it would have been funny if, as he put on the hat, one of the other shot him. Then that guy picks up the hat and is shot, but the third guy stops just before he picks up that hat with a "wait a minute. . ." Then we could either see them all nervously eyeing each other and the hat, or it could fade to black on the sounds of lots of gunfire.

Yes, it sounds farcical, and it probably is, but these guys were cannon fodder five minutes ago, so based on what's typical for action movies of the time, they were probably barely smart enough to tie their shoes. It's a feasible ending.