Paragon Films Inc., 86 min., Dir. Don Hulette
So I was flipping through upcoming films on IFC since I no longer have that channel, and this one came up. I figured, at 86 thrill packed minutes, at least i wouldn’t be wasting my whole night.
A very young Chuck Norris plays J.D. Dawes, a “zen trucker” who stops off to take a break at a truck stop and let his little bro (Michael Augenstein) haul some frozen dinners. The only thing that really identifies him as a “zen trucker” is that he’s doing some kind of meditation exercise with two dudes and he karate kicks a lot of hillbillies around. I guess you can’t expect too much back story from a film that has “Hit in the Face” as a keyword on IMDB.
Breaker! Breaker! has the ominous “N/A” rating on Rottentomates.com, meaning there were either no reviews or this was a direct to DVD type thing. I can see why. There is virtually no story whatsoever. Norris’ little brother gets kidnapped by a small town Sheriff’s department and there are a bunch of fistfights along the way. Norris befriends and sleeps with the judge’s daughter, which as you might imagine don’t sit too well with him. There’s some question in Norris’ zen trucker mind about whether his brother is even in the town, until, get this, the judge’s daughter serves a frozen dinner of the same brand that his little brother was hauling!!!!!
Things get ugly, and since the judge is too old and fat to fight Norris, he has a confrontation with one of the deputies that you can watch on some dude’s bootlegged VCR recording on YouTube. When I was watching I kept yelling “break that bottle!” and sure enough, he does. The fight takes place in a horse corral and for some reason the director felt it necessary to keep cutting to shots of the horse during the fight. Is the horse a metaphor for Norris’ spin kicks? It’s like the director woke up, watched half of a Sergio Leone western, said “hey, I think I’ll try that,” and four hours later Breaker! Breaker! was printed and ready for distribution.
Ahh, but there’s more. The film score is porno grade, at best. It sounds like a cassette tape from the $0.99 bin at a truck stop piped through a boombox, which might have been the point, but I doubt it. The martial arts: let’s just say that Norris might have had a black belt at the time, but the choreography and his fellow “actors” make him look like Star Wars Kid. There a lot of “I can see space between your foot and the other guy” kicks and “that dude just hit the deck three seconds too soon” punches.
*SPOILER ALERT*During the final fight, which Norris wins with his forty-ninth spin kick, his GF gets on the CB Radio and calls for backup in the form of a fleet of trucks that is so large it makes the earth shake. The only problem, the producers could only afford three or so trucks. They basically destroy the whole town, which consists of unused set pieces from Bonanza. In terms of great trucker flicks, this definitely is not one of them. In fact, trucking had hardly anything to do with the movie really, apart from the sparse use of CB radios and trucking metaphors. However, if you haven’t seen this film and you have Netflix, I have to recommend watching it because it is too funny to miss out on.
6/10: Time to take this rig home buddyboy…and by that I mean shutdown my computer
