IF YOU CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT, GET OUT OF EL PASO
"I think you’re just naturally hostile." Major Paul Hackett (Michael Ironside) to Jack Benteen (Nick Nolte)
When Walter Hill’s EXTREME PREJUDICE (1987) first came out, I couldn’t be bothered. With a title like that, and a setting on the Tex-Mex border, I pegged it as another corrupt-border-patrolmen-cum-exploited-wetbacks flick a la THE BORDER or AMERICAN JUSTICE.
That was before I blundered into the thing halfway into its initial HBO unspooling (I seem to be doing that a lot – see NEMESIS) and came across veteran screen heavy Michael Ironside leading an all-star team of action-movie bad guys on a bloody daylight bank robbery. "Whoa!" yelped I, obeying Ironside’s First Law (when channel-surfing, drop EVERYTHING when you come across Mr. Mike being bad) – and was sucked into Hill’s dusty, paranoid WILD BUNCH-meets-Watergate splatter Western.
Nick Nolte, granite-faced and humor-impaired, is Texas ranger Jack Benteen, who is NOT having a very good day. It could be due to the fact that his childhood chum Cash Bailey (Powers Boothe) has taken to wearing scummy white disco suits and Panama hats, swilling tequila, and cornering the local market for Columbian snot detergent. It might have something to do with his mariachi-singer girlfriend Sarita (Maria Conchita Alonzo), who used to be Cash’s girlfriend and still thinks of him at the most inopportune times – like in bed. It might have something to do with the good ol’ boy whose dope-dealing brother Jack had shot night before last, and who just ventilated Jack’s favorite local sheriff (Rip Torn) with a machine gun. It might even have to do with the aforementioned badguy B-team (more on them later).
OR: it might have to do with the fact that Nick’s wardrobe consists of basic black, even though Big Wally shot the thing in El Paso where it’s about nine hundred degrees in people’s iceboxes. I vote the latter.
Anywho, back to the heavies. With Nolte and Alonzo a bland-o couple, it’s the bad guys that make EXTREME PREJUDICE as fun to watch as it is. As Cash, Powers Boothe kicks his oily, reptilian charm into overdrive; he’s a silver-tongued devil, locquacious and rattlesnake-mean. Then there’s the band of Special Forces grunts whose daylight bank hit is actually a cover for getting at Cash’s safe-deposit box. We’ve got big Clancy Brown (THE BRIDE, HIGHLANDER), reprising his BUCKAROO BANZAI cowboy. We’ve got William Forsythe (THE ROCK, STONE COLD), portraying the most cheerfully obnoxious redneck imaginable. We’ve got Dan Tullis (who?), who’s got "I shoulda been a blaxploitation star" written all over him. We’ve got Matt Mulhern, warming up for his friendlier (but no less gung-ho) TV-sitcom Marine on Major Dad. And of course, we’ve got Michael Ironside, whose baleful glare, mirthless smile, low/flat/dead voice, and eruptions into ultraviolence insure a good time will be had.
There’s basically a whole lot of plot in addition to all the action, but what it all boils down to is: Cash takes Sarita with him across the border. Jack and the SpecForces grunts team up and go after him. Jack is given thirty minutes to go in and retrieve both Sarita and Cash before the grunts come in, guns blazing. Jack and Cash decide to have a duel. The grunts show up fifteen minutes early, start shooting, and say "Whoops!"
While all this is going on, you the viewer are treated to some of the most entertainingly brain-damaged dialog since Ed Wood Jr. started wearing ladies’ sweaters. In an early scene, Jack has a clandestine meeting with Cash where he meets Tom "Tiny" Lister (ex-footballer and failed pro wrestler) as one of Bailey’s bodyguards. Lister’s character is also an ex-gridironer, explaining to Jack "I hurt my knee," to which Jack growls "Looks like you hurt yer head." Or check out this exchange between Major Hackett (Ironside), Sgt. McRose (Brown), and Sgt. Biddle (Larry B. Scott) when they first observe Benteen:
McRose: Big sucker.
Biddle: You thinking of taking him on?
McRose: Why not? Might be fun.
Hackett: What do you got against cops?
McRose: One hit me once.
Hackett: And…?
McRose: He died.
Biddle: You snuffed a cop?
McRose: Naah, his mother-in-law backed over him by mistake in her LTD – which is why I’ve always liked Fords.
But, of course, it’s Ironside that puts Extreme Prejudice into the Flatline’s permanent video collection. Back in the days of his Sleazoid Express newsletter, Bill Landis defined a B-movie prototype known as a "blockhead:" sweaty, staring, no-necked, pontificating, and writhing in the grips of his own personal demons. By the time the action shifts down Mexico way, Hackett has gone 100% blockhead. In the scene where his treachery has been revealed (what treachery? Well, you’ll just have to rent the tape yerself…) and McRose has him at gunpoint, Hackett delivers the following gonzo soliloquoy:
"I’ve served our country for twenty years. Done every dirty job ever asked of me. I’ve been places and done things I just don’t think people should have to do. There are no heros, Larry. You and me, we’re just numbers on a bureaucrat’s desk…You stupid asshole, when are you going to wake up and take a look around you? They don’t care. Another couple of missions and you’ll be just like me!"
At which point all hell breaks loose. When the dust settles…aww, let’s just do this by the numbers, Joe Bob Briggs style:
Forty dead bodies. Three breasts. Two beasts (Cash’s bodyguards). Four gallons blood. Two motor vehicle chases, one with tanker-truck crash & burn. Minimal kung fu. Superb gun fu. Machete fu. Scorpion squishing. Rat on a skewer. Exploding bunny rabbit. Gratuitous redneck humor. Gratuitous mariachi music. Gratuitous Maria Conchita Alonzo. Toes roll. Michael Ironside says "Termination with extreme prejudice" better than anyone. Best WILD BUNCH ripoff since – hell, since Hill’s other splatter western (THE LONG RIDERS).
Three stars. Da Flatline sez check it out.
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