On Chuck Norris

I touched on the merits of Chuck Norris' acting the other day, and I felt today that I should address the matter further. I had watched one of his movies, "Silent Rage", and concluded that he is the worst. I mean that even in the undemanding arena of 80s action movies, he's got to be the worst actor in the bunch. He emotes less in than contemporaries who were playing robots. It's really a hell of a thing to watch.

Norris doesn't do especially well in scenes where he's called on to be a tough guy but it gets very dicey when he has to act normal. You'd think he would shine in fight scenes, having been the world middleweight champion of karate, but those films of his that I've seen so far don't call on him to fight as often as they call on him to shoot. To be fair, I've only scene three of his movies so far, so I'll reserve judgment there.

Having seen three of his films, I have found that his movies aren't absolutely unwatchable. That's no thanks to Chuck, but it is interesting to see how filmmakers get around the liability that he represents as a performer. Silent Rage solved the problem by simply leaving him absent from long stretches of the film. "Code Of Silence" surrounded him with a murderer's row of interesting character actors. "Invasion USA" tried to make sure that he didn't ever have to go more than a minute or two without committing an act of grisly violence to distract from what a glassy-eyed doll of a man he is.

I don't hate Chuck Norris' movies. Norris himself is bad, but there's still a kind of a charm in that. There was an experiment where they took a picture of an expressionless man, and this was paired with pictures of different things to create the impression in the mind of the viewer that he was reacting to it. Shown with a picture of soup, he looked hungry. With a picture of a coffin, he might look sad. His neutrality led people to project onto him. Maybe that's what Chuck has going for him.

His films as a whole are easier to enjoy without a theory as to why they work. They're good, mindless action films that exploit our affection for action and our occasional propensity for right wing reactionary politics. I don't think you're going to go broke as a filmmaker depending on the magical cinematic combination of those things. It was all John Wayne ever had, and he became a legend with no better chops as an actor than Chuck and significantly worse physical prowess. If Chuck possessed any charisma to pair with his martial arts skills, he might have taken over the world.