When actor, martial artist, outspoken Republican, and honorary Texan Chuck Norris, died last week at age 86, younger audiences knew him as the subject of memes, the star of that long-running cop show Walker, Texas Ranger, or the various out-of-context scenes that would randomly pop up on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, including an infamous one featuring a very young Haley Joel Osment. But those a little older will remember that this pop culture image of Norris grew from the ’80s actioners he did for Cannon Films, the B-movie temple that gave us such exploitative artifacts as the Breakin’ movies, Charles Bronson’s Death Wish saga, and that fourth Christopher Reeve Superman movie. To understand how and when Norris became a right-wing action hero, his Cannon era is the place to start.
In the ’80s, conservatism had a chokehold on America. Actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan was convinced that the then-Soviet Union was going to nuke us to kingdom come, setting off a gung-ho cultural movement that was all about extreme patriotism. Ronnie and his lot co-opted Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.,” praising the rocker for penning a radio-friendly national anthem with a catchy, pro-America chorus. (Obviously, they ignored the parts of the song about our country’s mistreatment of Vietnam vets.) But when it came to getting Americans all charged up about kicking ass on behalf of Uncle Sam, nothing beats the decade’s action movies. Right-leaning movie stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were dueling, hulking white knights at the box office, churning out bloody adventures like Rambo: First Blood Part II and Commando, where they played ex-military men who go back in the shit to take out as many outside threats as possible.
Norris, who was already making chopsocky actioners after rising to prominence going toe-to-toe with friend/mentor Bruce Lee in The Way Of The Dragon in 1972, jumped into that flag-waving racket when he starred in the first two Missing In Action movies for Cannon. Made back-to-back, these Rambo ripoffs were best known for being released out of sequence, with the sequel dropping first in 1984 and the inferior first film (forever known as Missing In Action 2: The Beginning) getting released several months later in 1985. Regardless, both films were high-grossing hits, prompting Norris and Cannon to continue their machine-gun-heavy partnership.
Out of all the blood-soaked actioners of that decade, Norris’ Cannon films were the most brazenly, shamelessly xenophobic. Along with being explosion-filled spectacles (cars and buildings blow up ad nauseam in these flicks), the villains were always savage killers from other countries, ready to kill Americans just because. In Invasion U.S.A., Cannon’s ridiculously gory 1985 knockoff of John Milius’ already-jingoistic Red Dawn, an army of Russians, Germans, Asians, and Cubans invade the Unites States and causes all kinds of chaos—and it’s up to Norris’ heavily armed, lone wolf ex-CIA agent to stop them. The usually affable Norris does his worst Clint Eastwood impression here, keeping an awkwardly deadpan stare on his face as he wipes out these unwelcome visitors with a semi-automatic firearm in each hand.
A year later, Norris played another soldier who comes out of retirement in The Delta Force, which is such a rehash of The Dirty Dozen, they even got Dirty main player Lee Marvin (in his final film role before passing away in 1987) to co-star. Norris and Marvin lead a heavily populated, racially diverse, special forces unit (Liam Neeson, Kevin Dillon, and Mykelti Williamson can be seen as extras) going after a group of Palestinian terrorists (led by the very white character actor Robert Forster) who take a bunch of people hostage after hijacking a plane. Inspired by the terrorist hijackings that were popping up back then, specifically TWA Flight 847, The Delta Force is half action-adventure, half airplane-disaster film. (The folks on the plane include such familiar C-listers as Joey Bishop, Shelley Winters, and Airport/Dirty vet George Kennedy.)
Co-written and directed by Menahem Golan, who notoriously and prolifically ran Cannon with his cousin, fellow Israeli producer Yoram Globus, The Delta Force goes hard when villainizing Palestinians, painting them as brutal scoundrels who only claim to be “freedom fighters.” Meanwhile, the Force prepares for action in Israel, even getting help from accommodating Israeli officers. (The movie was also filmed in Israel, at studios owned by Golan and Globus.) It’s one of Norris’ movies from this period whose problematic propaganda feels even more dangerous and reckless than it did when it came out 40 years ago.
While audiences ate it up, critics thankfully saw through the bullshit. Roger Ebert gave Invasion a whopping one-and-a-half stars, calling it “a brain-damaged, idiotic thriller,” while his onscreen partner Gene Siskel slammed The Delta Force‘s second-rate bloodlust: “Norris gets off shooting rocket launchers from his specially built motorcycle, and we sit there stunned at the movie industry’s ability to make money off any tragedy.”
Some contemporary cinephiles have taken Norris’ ’80s reign with a grain of salt. While action-loving “outlaw film critic” Vern holds the movies of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and other ’80s action heroes in high regard, he still sees Norris as a tolerable but reductive cover artist. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m still not a member of the Chuck Norris Fan Club,” is how he started off his 2016 review of Missing In Action, before mentioning that it “has a political message based on a right-wing pet cause, but it can’t quite match the outlandish cartoonishness of Invasion, and it’s much more emotionally manipulative.”
“Being white and growing up in the American South, in sort of an evangelical Christian community, Chuck Norris was positioned as our culture’s Bruce Lee,” Joe Scott, a Greensboro-based film scribe and podcaster, tells The A.V. Club about the VHS copies of Norris movies he watched with his family back in the day. Scott remembers getting all of Norris’ Cannon films—even the straight-to-video ones—at Dollar General. He also claims that one of the five men who were killed while filming a helicopter sequence in the 1990 sequel Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection taught martial arts at his elementary school. Scott acknowledges that Norris was seen as “the most accessible hero” for someone of his upbringing, but even as a kid he knew not to look for any deep insight in a Chuck Norris movie.
“They were definitely movies that positioned American exceptionalism above everything,” he said. “At no point did any of his movies state that he might be wrong about anything, that he was ever going to lose any of his fights, and that any of his wars or causes were less than just. I mean, he made three movies about Vietnam and none of them challenged or questioned or examined what the hell we were doing there as a country.”
Yet, even Norris’ jingoistic Cannon canon holds value, if only as a gateway to better, less offensive action movies. Watching Chuck Norris films was all some had, Scott said, “Until you were lucky enough to find someone who had some Bruce Lee tapes and get you on to the real shit.” Norris, however, just doubled down, moving on to become the face of another, stranger kind of American exceptionalism on the small screen.