Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Jon Hess
• Written by Thomas Ian Griffith
• Starring
  • Thomas Ian Griffith
  • Lance Henriksen
  • James Earl Jones
  • Tony Todd
  • Burt Young

The ’80s were the golden age for the Action Hero movie. We’re not just talking about normal action stars, we’re talking about the mighty muscled ones who could take out entire enemy platoons with no injuries save a couple of artfully placed and easily ignored flesh wounds. Stallone. Schwarzenegger. Norris. Seagal. All of them larger than life, indomitable in a fight, comic-booky to the extreme.

That kind of burned out in the wake of Die Hard, where Bruce Willis portrayed an action hero who gets the snot beaten out of him and keeps coming back. Within a very few years, and for most of the ’90s, underdog Everyman heroes became the norm, and Willis and Cruise and even Hanks were playing much more mortal protagonists who survived because of their pluck, their luck, and their ability to stand back up after having the crap kicked out of them.

What talented trigger fingers you have!

It was right during that transition that Excessive Force came along, with Thomas Ian Griffith very much in the spirit of the Unbeatable Hero mold. The tag line for the movie posits Griffith as the ’90s answer to Seagal in the ’80s and Norris in the ’70s. A pity for him that it’s so darned true.

Griffith plays Terry McCain, one of a trio of Chicago police detectives — along with Dylan (Tom Hodges) and Frankie (Tony Todd) — who’ve got a vendetta against mob boss Sal DiMarco (Burt Young). Being the badged badasses that they are, they take it upon themselves (without any backup) to break up a drug deal between DiMarco’s underlings and some Irish gangsters. Naturally, things don’t go smoothly, and guns start a-poppin’ on all sides. We get quite a bit of eye-candy as Terry punches, chops, and highkicks seemingly dozens of armed thugs, all without mussing his preppy clothes or delicately coiffed hair.

When the smoke clears, only the three cops and two of DiMarco’s men are left alive (one gets away, the other’s in traction after fling through a barroom window and landing on an easily visible cushion pad). Terry then takes it upon himself to lean on — literally — the injured one in his hospital room to get a confession incriminating DiMarco. At which point, I wondered if Griffith (who also wrote the screenplay) had ever met a real cop. Um, does the phrase “under duress” ring a bell?

Henriksen, trying out the Blond Beach Cop look.

Obvious to me (but not to Terry and his cronies), the judge immediately throws out the forced confession and the case with it. This doesn’t sit well with Devlin (Lance Henriksen), Terry’s superior, who tosses all of the “loose cannon” cliches into a single berating. Not that Devlin’s actually got it in for Terry; he simply wants to see DiMarco go down, and Terry’s assinine antics sure aren’t helping.

Terry naturally fumes, but let’s not forget that he’s got a life outside his obsession with DiMarco. For instance, he often hangs at the jazz club on the ground floor of his apartment building — run by James Earl Jones, no less — sitting in on the piano with the band. And until recently, he’d been romantically involved with prestigious supermodel Anna (Charlotte Lewis). Did I mention that Griffith wrote this screenplay for himself?

Of course, if Terry were left alone to fume about DiMarco and tickle the ivories, it wouldn’t be much of a movie, would it? But DiMarco’s got a major grievance; in the course of the bust, $3,000,000 went missing, poof. So first he kills the single escaping henchman (for bungling it), then starts after the three cops, one of whom must have it.

Terry finds out later that they were only LDS missionaries, trying to give him a free Book of Mormon.

Dylan buys it first (after some gratuitous sex, naturally), first having his kneecaps broken by DiMarco’s son Vinnie (W. Earl Brown) during questioning. Then Frankie gets exploded along with his apartment. With only Terry still walking around in one piece, Devlin lets him know that there are sometimes when you have to break the rules to save your skin, and that Devlin will cover for whatever Terry thinks is necessary.

Terry’s vendetta gives him an opportunity to beat the hell out of a private club composed entirely of the employees of Italian-American businessmen, then go mope at his ex-girlfriend’s place (nothing like a little bit of bereavement to reawaken old passions), and then finally to DiMarco’s after-hours restaurant, which is so ridiculously under-guarded — UNguarded, really — that one wonders how DiMarco managed to stay alive so long. After beating two henchmen without breaking a sweat, Terry pulls a gun on DiMarco… but can’t bring himself to shoot a frightened, crying, pathetic gangster.

So if Terry didn’t kill him… then why does the next morning’s newspaper proudly proclaim “DiMarco Found Dead”?

Obviously, there are doublecrosses, duplicity, and various schemes afoot, all of which engenders a strong sense of deja vu. I’ve already mentioned the strong vanity element of the story — hey, if you’re going to write a screenplay to show off your martial arts skills, you’re going to make yourself ultra-cool, right? But this actually isn’t the worst flaw, being exclipsed by both cliche and convenience.

Looks like the background goon got one of those diagonal thingies right through the eye. Talk about a lack of perspective…

As examples of cliche… Well, did you catch that DiMarco’s son’s name is Vinnie? It seems that Griffith’s inspiration was more or less a whole big stack of other cops’n'mobsters movies, all at least a few iterations removed from real police work. (Would it have hurt to read a couple of Ed McBain novels? Or even watched a few episodes of Law & Order?) Terry’s at least as stylin’ a detective (and as improbably young) as Sony Crockett, and no one else is any more original. DiMarco spends all of his time eating in his own Italian restaurants (made me hungry, but didn’t get high marks for originality).

The convenience factor is even worse. Even I, Captain Suburban himself, would have better instincts for self-preservation, including having damned good locks on my doors, and not trying to hide out in a farmhouse owned in my name (no big secret, Terry, that that stuff’s a matter of public record). Not a one of the various thugs and goons on Terry’s tail has the least idea of tactics or strategy; surrounding a location is apparently never an option. We’ve even got the hackneyed advice of an interloper hearing a message being recorded on someone’s answering machine — TWICE. And apparently, a wanted felon, who also happens to be a fellow officer known by sight to everyone else on the force, can linger in wait in his car right outside police headquarters without any possibility of being seen.

“Oh yeah? Well, fork YOU!”

Griffith’s managed to make a living for himself since that first couple of superheroic films, largely in the roles of bad guys (he was perfectly suited for John Carpenter’s Vampires, as his mouth is already perfectly shaped to accomodate prosthetic teeth). But he tried to bust into a subgenre already on the wane, in a vehicle frankensteined out of pieces of other, better movies. It’s no surprise that he never became he ’90s answer to Chuck Norris.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 22
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 5
  • Tony Todd (Frankie) played Worf’s brother Kurn on several episodes of TNG and DS9, as well as the grown-up Jake Sisco in the DS9 episode “The Visitor,” and “Alpha Hirogen” in the Voyager episode “Prey”
  • Tony Epper (the delivery man) played “Drunken Klingon” in the DS9 episode “Apocalypse Rising”
  • Danny Goldring (Lieutenant Landry) played “Legate Kell” in the DS9 episode “Civil Defense,” “Burke” in the DS9 episode “Nor the Battle to the Strong,” “Alpha Hirogen/Nazi Commandant” in the Voyager two-parter “The Killing Game,” and the Nausicaan Captain in the Enterprise episode “Fortunate Son”
  • Bobby Bass (the limo driver) played a guard in the classic episode “Space Seed”
  • Tom Hodges (Dylan) played “Pechetti” in the DS9 episode “Empok Nor”