EXTREME PREJUDICE (1987) - ***1/2

You know a great badass film scene is one that seems mundane, even silly on paper....until its executed. With EXTREME PREJUDICE, take the scene when the villain Powers Boothe wants to knock off a Texas sheriff who's become "unreliable to depend upon," so Boothe sends him a present: A cute fluffy pet rabbit. The corrupt cop loves such a random gift, and opens the cage...which triggers off a bomb that blows him and his SUBWAY restaurant up. Take that Jared!

I tell ya, I can't believe I didn't see this back in my days at High School where I was cherry-popping into full-fledged cinephilia. I am certain I would have loved EXTREME PREJUDICE as that sort of great little movie that nobody around me had seen, much less even know of, much like I was late one night when I saw THE WARRIORS on television. No coincidence then that both films were directed by the great Walter Hill, who's increasingly proving to me that he is one of the more criminally underrated American filmmakers of the last 40 years.

Most of his movies are pseudo-westerns, but like his THE LONG RIDERS this is a full-fledged-western, except its set in contemporary times like the Coens' NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. The difference being though that instead of philosophical musings about fate and mortality, EXTREME PREJUDICE is a classic genre action set-up in that two larger-than-life macho badass men, one good (Nick Nolte) and one bad (Boothe), fight for supremacy of a land....and the heart of a woman (Maria Alonso). They were the best of friends as children, but Boothe's drug trade from Mexico has sort of pissed off Nolte the Texas Ranger.

Hill doesn't avoid cliches, as much as play them by casting two giants of masculine charisma in Nolte and Boothe. Nolte is perfect as the stone-face hero, the only one in Texas apparently willing to stand up to his buddy-turned-enemy, and won't take any of his bribes.

"You can buy me, Cash. Hell, you always could. But you can't buy the badge, and one without the other ain't no goddamn good."

Boothe is equally awesome as the devil's advocate for his career, and in their first confrontation, even sneers that his massive monetary donations to charity make a bigger difference for the better than Nolte can in trying to play John Wayne. Then Boothe shows off his well-equipped private army, along with his own helicopter airfleet, in contrast to Nolte's out-gunned and understaffed police force...which doesn't deter Nolte at all.

PREJUDICE may be set in the 1980s, but the main storyline up to even the epic finale gunfight at Boothe's Mexican fortress, could have been set a hundred years earlier and we wouldn't have seen the difference. What does clearly stick out though from the Reagan Decade is the film's subplot in a mysterious U.S. government special ops squad of "dead" soldiers who orchestrate a grand bank robbery just to rob Boothe's accounting books...and what a cool gang of guys you have here. They include Clancy Brown (villain of HIGHLANDER and the great HBO television series CARNIVALE), William Forsythe (baddie of THE DEVIL'S REJECTS and John Goodman's fellow escapee in RAISING ARIZONA), and their leader in goddamn Michael Ironside (a nemesis from TOTAL RECALL.)

You gotta dig how two of the soldiers stage a fight against each other in the Unemployment Office of the same town as the bank, just so they could be jailed up in the local police precinct and scope out Nolte's manpower and capacity. Plus when the robbery is partly-botched and one of them gets killed, another teammate is greatly upset. Brown tries to tell him that at least they accomplished the objective, and the teammate utters a wonderful line of despair:

"Yeah, it still doesn't change the fact that my buddy's in a body bag. And he ain't in Lebanon or Honduras, but in fuckin' Texas."

If anything, I just dig that Hill and his writers (including the mad genius John Milius) have these high-tech spooks, trained for insane commando shit overseas, be at a tactical disadvantage when performing a similar military domestic operation. Plus, there is something Hill and Milius trademark in how Nolte the lowly redneck cop goes all ballsy in apprehending two of the soldiers....and they don't hate him, but actually respect him for pulling that off.

Also, unlike every other platoon or heist flick which have the obligatory electronics nerd expert, the black nerd for PREJUDICE actually fires a gun, and damn good at it.

We need more of that at the movies.

So eventually in PREJUDICE, the two plotlines converge when Nolte and the troops go down to Mexico to take out Boothe...and this is a pure genre western when Nolte goes into Boothe's joint, his army raising their guns at Nolte, and Nolte says anyway that he's dragging Boothe back over the border. He calls Boothe out as a coward, and they start their duel...and I just laughed my ass off when Alonso starts crying, and Boothe bitches at her for ruining the mood. Then a massive blood and bullet bath this side of THE WILD BUNCH interrupts them.....but afterwards, they resume the stances for their death game.

OK, that's just awesome, having adversaries that are so keen on having their ritualistic man-to-man fight. It may sound goofy and ridiculous, but just watch EXTREME PREJUDICE, and see how Nolte/Boothe/Hill just pull it off.

What perhaps keeps PREJUDICE from being a great movie, and not simply just a pretty good kickass flicker, is how poorly written Alonso's character is. I know her character is supposed to be a glorified object with arms and legs that Boothe and Nolte keep fighting over, but Jesus Christ couldn't they have given her a bigger and better dramatic bone to chew on? Compare that with Deborah Van Valkenburgh in THE WARRIORS, and you'll see why that movie has the slight edge.

But otherwise, go see EXTREME PREJUDICE, if simply for Nolte's sidekick deputy sheriff in Rip Torn delivers some memorable lines like: "Hell, Jack...the only thing worse than a politician is a child molester!"