‘When I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you...’
Despite the fact that I love ’80s action movies, Chuck Norris is more of a meme to me than an actor. Chuck Norris Facts were one of the great memes of the early internet age. A simpler time. A better time? Perhaps. Even Norris himself is a household name, it’s safe to say that his body of work has been largely forgotten about now. And that’s a shame, because Code of Silence is actually a thoughtful and competent movie…
In 1980s Chicago, Sergeant Eddie Cusack (Norris) is a courageous cop with an impeccable moral compass. When his colleague Cragie (Ralph Foody) is accused of planting evidence on the body of a young man he fatally shot during a sting operation, Cusack leads the charge against corruption on the force. Also appearing are Dennis Farina (himself once a cop) and, weirdly, Frasier’s John Mahoney for about five minutes.
I will begin by saying that this is not at all what I expected from a Norris movie. When all you know about a man are facts like, ‘Behind Chuck Norris’ beard, there is only another fist’, you expect his films to be a brainless punchathon. This is not at all the case. Norris delivers a performance here that is much more serene and still than his ’80s counterparts. He’s happy to get beaten up, get stuff wrong and just be generally morally complex in a way that his contemporaries simply were not. It makes sense that Norris is a devout Christian and family man (and all round nice guy according to his co-stars) because his character here is much more authentic than the kind of roles that Stallone and Schwarzenegger were portraying at the time (that’s not to say Norris’ is better than his peers. He isn’t, but he is different from them in an interesting way). Anyway, he’s great here, and the film itself offers a raw and gritty snapshot of Chicago in the ’80s (director Andrew Davis, himself a Chicago native, insisted on shooting on location).
Code of Silence is a surprising film. Originally conceived as a Dirty Harry sequel, the presence of Norris adds a softness that would have been missing with Clint Eastwood playing this role, and for that he should be applauded. While we’re not talking Beverly Hills Cop or Lethal Weapon levels of greatness, Davis’ film is still better than it has any right to be – a minor success.
