An incredibly unpleasant film, the Clint Eastwood-directed Sudden Impact begins with a woman getting gang raped (played by Eastwood’s real-life lover, Sondra Locke) and just gets nastier from there. To its credit(?), Sudden Impact tries to reconcile with the tension between Callahan’s extreme methods and the fact that he gets results. But given the nastiness of the central crime, Sudden Impact stays totally on Callahan’s side, convinced that the law must be broken to stop extreme sickos.
5. Code of Silence (1985)
As we’ll see again shortly, director Andrew Davis made his name by getting excellent performances out of action heroes with zero charisma. In Code of Silence, he pulls that trick with Chuck Norris, a man whose martial arts abilities impressed Bruce Lee, and whose acting chops impressed nobody. Davis gets a lot of help in Code of Silence by filling the movie with great supporting actors, including Dennis Farina, Henry Silva, and Ron Dean.
But as much as the ensemble cast helps spread out a twinge responsibility, it also makes the Chicago PD look really, really corrupt. Which, to its credit, is kind of the point of Code of Silence. Written by Michael Butler, Dennis Shryack, and Mike Gray, Code of Silence deals with a Chicago gang war that erupts after a corrupt cop kills an innocent. The resulting turmoil forces the officers to decide if they stand for the law or for the badge, and while Norris’s Eddie Cusack fights for the former, a lot of others do not.
4. Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
“It’s just been revoked,” sneers Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) before he kills corrupt South African official Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) who just invoked diplomatic immunity. It’s hard to see how an aging sergeant has the right to revoke any diplomat’s immunity, even if that diplomat is an Afrikaner who extolls the virtues of Apartheid South Africa and the sergeant is a Black man. But then, Murtaugh and his partner Riggs (Mel Gibson) already committed their fair share of questionable activity in the first Lethal Weapon from 1987, directed by Richard Donner.
Donner returns for the sequel, but while original screenwriter Shane Black has a story credit, alongside Warren Murphy, Jeffrey Boam gets the sole script credit on this follow-up. This bundle of names makes it hard to see who exactly deserves the fault for pushing Murtaugh to the brink instead of making him keep Riggs in check. When Murtaugh gets too old to be the sensible one, Lethal Weapon falls out of joint, and both cops engage in all manner of illegal behavior to take down their reprehensible quarry in a third act bloodbath.
3. Above the Law (1988)
If they’re not thinking about his embarrassing line of direct-to-video action movies or supporting dictators like Vladimir Putin, anyone who hears the name Steven Seagal thinks of 1992’s Under Siege. And with good reason. Seagal may be the world’s least convincing action star, but Under Siege rules, thanks to the real star Tommy Lee Jones and the director Andrew Davis. Before Under Siege, Davis got an earlier solid performance from Seagal with Above the Law.