Losing Cannon's Loose Canon

By Vadim Rizov

As time passes, once disreputable or barely considered movies are re-evaluated: film noir has long been made classic fare on par with glossier Hollywood, and '70s horror and exploitation were more recently brought back into the fold. The bulk of the Cannon Films corpus — cheap '80s ass-kickers for undiscriminating multiplex audiences — is unlikely to ever benefit from such crate-digging instincts. In making a case for the oft-reviled producing team of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, Lincoln Center's retrospective focuses on auteur-friendly cinema, the anomalies in the company's slate.

That means splitting the difference between movies that were once standard programmers but have been deemed worthy of re-inspection because of their director — John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II — and straight-up art fare, with some of Godard and Raoul Ruiz's weirdest movies leading the charge.

Most studios, no matter how pandering and shameless their general output, feel the need to release some token "adult" awards-bait fare. More often than not, that stuff is just as homogenized and studiously non-confrontational as the trashy fare, just in different ways (c.f.. the entire Oscar-oriented work of Ron Howard). In refreshingly eccentric contrast, non-commercial Golan-Globus movies couldn't have made money under any circumstances: getting Godard to "adapt" King Lear is pretty much guaranteeing your role as artistic patron rather than shrewd investor.

It's understandable that Lincoln Center wouldn't want to show the movies that actually financed that art cinema; those films are generally terrible. Though the company was disturbingly profitable in the '80s, their movies have largely faded from mass pop cultural memory: few remember that there was once a B-movie star like Michael Dudikoff, or a franchise improbably titled American Ninja. Cannon Films' most enduring, pop-culturally ubiquitous contribution to culture was the Chuck Norris vehicle. "I signed [him] for two pictures a year, seven years' contract," Golan recently boastfully remembered. Norris would stick to killing commies and rewinning the Vietnam War, over and over; concept trumped execution. The first two Missing In Action movies — big returns on small budgets — were filmed one after another; only after production did the brothers realize (or care) that the second film was better, and released it first.

Norris' ultra-violent, ultra-self-righteous approach to ass-kicking was imitated — on even smaller budgets and with far less cultural endurance — by fading star Charles Bronson (brought back for an extra four Death Wish sequels) and Dudkikoff, star of the American Ninja series. The latter's main selling point seemed to be that having a white dude in a ninja mask made it easier to tell the hero and villain apart, even with masks covering their faces: the hero was the one without the sinister minority eyes. Just like Norris' films, the main function was to win the Vietnam War correctly this time. American Ninja, like many cheapies, was set and shot in the Philippines, which kept costs low and allowed for a variety of wormy Asians to be shot up in style. The villain is named Ortega, but his hammy French accent places the movie firmly in Vietnam territory.

Mainstream Cannon releases run on the fuel of hypertrophied, comically overblown patriotism, the kind only a grateful immigrant can summon up. Louis B. Mayer, transformed from Belarussian immigrant Lazar Meir to the highest-paid man in America from 1939-45, gave the country the Andy Hardy series in return, a rigorously sterilized vision of idyllic small-town American life. Similarly, the collected Canon corpus is so overblown in its nationalistic and militaristic fervor it's pretty comical. 1987's Over The Top — the ironically adored Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling opus directed by Golan himself— has Robin Zander's ridiculous "In This Country" as its theme song ("In this country our hearts are open/We are free to fly again").

Any enduring legacy the popular Cannon Films might have lies not in their overwhelming shoddiness — few profitable films have been so poorly crafted — but in their unrepentant endorsement of lone-wolf vigilante justice, administered in situations entirely devoid of moral ambiguity.

That spirit was, for some years, missing from blockbusters, which have become much more careful (and less fun) at trying to be morally responsible. If there's such a thing as neo-exploitation, the Cannon ethos has been recently reborn in movies like Taken, Sylvester Stallone's successful rebooting of all things '80s (with the new Rambo and supergroup tribute The Expendables both performing well) and the forthcoming Dwayne Johnson vehicle Faster. The poster's tagline — "slow justice is no justice at all" — leaves zero doubt that when Johnson promises, in the trailer, "I'm going to kill them all," you'll be right alongside cheering.

After many years of retirement, the righteous vigilante has returned. Less absurdly histrionic in their patriotism but just as secure in the fundamental right of all Americans to fire their guns as needed (but now with glossier production values), such films don't have token bad guys who threaten the world as their villains: the stakes are personal, and moral questions ducked. Not for them are Jason Bourne's memory gaps and desire to flee.

Just as the '80s Cannon films took American supremacy and the righteousness of firepower as a given, these new films harness an implicit conservatism: no questions, just action taken instantly and correctly.