“She’s got something, Lieutenant! Maybe it’s one of those karate weirdos, like in the movies!”

Drake’s rating: There are zero explosions in this movie. What kind of ‘70s flick is this?

Drake’s review: Chuck Norris is not a good actor. Look, I think we just need to all agree on that right off so that I don’t have to keep dancing around that fact or insert subtle* commentary about Norris’s distinct lack of thespian talent. He is just not a very good actor, and he never was. In fact, one of the most Chuck Norris things about Chuck Norris is the fact that he made a bunch of movies and a long-running TV series, and he never really got any better than he was in his early films. He was just Chuck Norris.

And that was okay, quite honestly, because he made it work. You would know, going into a Chuck Norris movie, pretty much how it would begin and end, and you’d know that Norris would be doing a bunch of karate all the way through it. That was what you came for, after all, and Norris was capable of delivering some impressive martial arts scenes. A former tournament fighter with a bunch of wins under his (black) belt, Norris wasn’t as unbeatable as his legend makes him out to be,** but he was nevertheless a multi-time champion and had an impressive six-year run with the Professional Middleweight Karate title.

So if you’re coming in to A Force of One, you know what you’re in for. The good thing is, this movie delivers while still being a fairly solid thriller. When a pair of cops working a narcotics case are killed by an unknown assailant, suspicion falls on the killer being a highly-trained martial artist due to the nature of the deaths. Detective Amanda Rust (Jennifer O’Neill, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud) is the first one to pick up on the clues, and also convinces her lieutenant, Sam Dunne (Clu Gulager, Return of the Living Dead) to get the detectives some first-hand self-defense training so that they might stand a chance against the mysterious attacker.

That of course brings them to martial arts trainer Matt Logan (Norris, Invasion USA), who not only runs a dōjō but is in training himself for a big championship match. Which of course means we get an extra dose of karate goodness in A Force of One, as Logan gets in the ring for a fight and then later watches the man he’ll soon be facing, Jerry Sparks (fellow martial arts legend “Superfoot” Bill Wallace), as he dispatches an opponent as well.

But the film wisely stays centered, mixing martial arts and cop flick in a fairly even-handed manner, so that one element never really takes center stage over the other. The police stay on the trail of the killer and his drug dealing allies, while Logan keeps training, both himself and his new students, as the big fight gets closer and closer.

Just as wisely, the filmmakers here surround Norris with veteran talent who can carry the movie, practically a necessity since Wallace is a novice to the screen as well. The detective roles are filled with familiar faces from movies and television, and although there are no big surprises in this flick, it’s all in all a solid effort. The big knock on it may be that it’s perhaps too formulaic and safe, and feels almost like a TV movie or a series pilot rather than a big screen affair. Still, that plays to Norris’s strengths fairly well and minimizes his weaknesses. The action stays on a more personal level, and I always thought Norris worked better on smaller scale movies, before he went to Cannon Films and started blowing up everything in sight.

A Force of One is a pretty good Chuck Norris movie. It keeps things fairly simple and features the martial arts elements without letting them take over the movie. It’s also very much a product of its time, when martial arts films in the U.S. were still a novelty and before future stars like Jet Li, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Donnie Yen really took them to a whole new level.

And then there’s Tony Jaa. Man, I really have no idea how that man does what he does. And if you’re unfamiliar with some of these names, I got me some full-contact reviewin’ to do!

*Granted, subtlety is not my strong suit.

**Tonny Tulleners in particular had Norris’s number, and beat him in all three rounds. But that was an unusual case for Norris, as, in true movie-like fashion, he was generally able to come back and win his rematches. I’m assuming he had a killer training montage music track.

Intermission!

• Bill Wallace was also a karate champion, who held titles in kickboxing as well. He was nicknamed “Superfoot” for his lightning-fast kicks, and he does some nice work in this movie. He acquits himself well as the overconfident foil to Norris’s nice-guy persona and gets to show off some cool martial arts moves of his own.
• How is kickboxing different from karate? Well, at the time Wallace competed, it meant you could kick the legs which was disallowed in which karate. Which, yeah, it hurts. Nothing like having a big shin bruise for a week.
• A Force of One was written by Ernest Tidyman. Tidyman was the successful author of the John Shaft novels, and later wrote the screen adaptation of the character for Shaft as well as the scripts for The French Connection and High Plains Drifter, among others.
• OK, now I wanna review either Donnie Yen’s Ip Man or Tony Jaa’s The Protector. But which to do first? Decisions, decisions…