Chuck Norris died Thursday; he was 86 years old. The action movie star fought Bruce Lee on the big screen before becoming a household name with a series of movies and a long-running TV show. For me, he was the post-Bruce Lee martial arts hero whose movies I gladly gave my money to as a kid and a teenager, often with diminishing returns. Those movies may not have been classics, or even very good. But to me, they were still pretty cool.
Depending on your age, you may have first encountered Norris from his 1990s hit series, “Walker, Texas Ranger,” which ran for nine seasons on CBS. But if you were from the earliest years of Generation X, you had a long list of material to watch in theaters. Though known for his martial arts movies, Norris also starred in Vietnam war films, a goofy action comedy or two, and the occasional horror flick. I snuck into a few of his R-rated features, starting with 1981’s violent cop revenge caper, “An Eye for an Eye.”
Four years prior, my truck driving uncle Jack took me and a few cousins to see Norris’s first big starring role, a movie called “Breaker! Breaker!” Made in 1977 at the height of Hicksploitation, this film had the typical plot for that genre: trucker avenges a brutal wrong (usually perpetrated by the cops or a corrupt judge) by getting his CB radio buddies involved. Vehicular mayhem ensued.
Avenging his brother, Chuck and his crew destroy an entire town run by corrupt law officials, driving their trucks through buildings with reckless abandon. “Look! A drive-thru gas station!” one trucker shouts before sending his rig through the place. Lots of explosions and car crashes occur, both of which were catnip for me as a kid.
“Breaker! Breaker!” must have been the first time I saw Norris’s martial arts skills. I didn’t see his legendary Roman Colosseum fight with Bruce Lee in Lee’s “The Way of the Dragon” (1972) until it played on a double bill with Lee’s unfinished “Game of Death,” around 1982. Norris held numerous degrees of black belt in martial arts like judo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Karate, Taekwondo, and others. That was why director Lee cast him in their climactic battle, which was perhaps the only time any of Lee’s characters had a formidable opponent onscreen.
I had to sneak into that double feature — damn you, R-rating — but it wasn’t the last time I outwitted theater ushers to see a Chuck Norris movie. He battled ninjas in 1980’s “The Octagon” a year before “Enter the Ninja.” He bested the Hong Kong mafia in 1982’s “Forced Vengeance.” That same year, his lawman character fought an unkillable maniac in “Silent Rage,” one of the most unsatisfying horror movies I sat through back then.
All of these features arrived before 1984’s Vietnam War-set “Missing in Action,” where Norris switched gears and jumped on the “Rambo” bandwagon. Two sequels starring his character, Braddock, followed, making Norris (along with another “Chuck,” Charles Bronson) the king of the Cannon Group movies — practically every other Cannon Group movie in the 1980s starred one of those Chucks. Known for horror, action, and martial arts movies, Cannon also produced 1986’s “The Delta Force,” where Norris costarred with legendary badass Lee Marvin in a plot about terrorists hijacking a plane.
So far, this tribute has been a trip through movies I had to sneak into to see. But Norris did make some PG-rated features. One of them, 1983’s Texas Ranger actioner, “Lone Wolf McQuade,” was the inspiration for “Walker, Texas Ranger.” He also made a very bad movie that I have loads of affection for, 1986’s “Firewalker.” That’s a very goofy desert adventure where he and Lou Gossett Jr. search for gold.
However, if I had to pick a favorite Chuck Norris movie, it would be a tie between “Breaker! Breaker!” and 1978’s “Good Guys Wear Black.” Granted, these contain less martial arts action than some of the later features I mentioned, but as movies they were well-constructed vehicles. And “Good Guys Wear Black,” about a commando trying to figure out who’s killing the guys in his unit, contains perhaps the most memorable stunt Norris did. It involved a speeding car and a well-timed leap. It was why my cousins and I went to see the movie in the first place. Like the title of yet another movie Norris starred in, he was truly “A Force of One.”
Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe’s film critic.
