Chuck Norris: 8 Essential Movies

Carlos Ray “Chuck” Norris was already an Air Force veteran, a martial-arts teacher, a middleweight karate champion, and Black Belt Magazine‘s “Fighter of the Year” by the time he made his movie debut in Bruce Lee’s pre-Enter the Dragon film. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that their climactic showdown in Rome’s Collisseum remains one of the greatest screen fights of all time. Once the hairy-chested Norris cracks his knuckles and both men begin limbering up, offering a preview of their respective combat styles — oh, it’s on! The nearly 10-minute sequence is a pure adrenaline rush even before they start trading blows, and when Norris silently waves his finger at his opponent after a melee, it’s like you’re seeing his entire persona as an action hero in embryonic form. The two actors had trained with each other before Lee went to Hong Kong to kickstart his movie career. He later called up his old sparring partner and, as Norris recounted on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, “said ‘I want to do a fight scene that everyone will remember.” Mission freakin’ accomplished.

After The Way of the Dragon made him a sensation, Norris got his first lead role in the truckersploitation classic Breaker! Breaker! (1977). It was his next movie, however, that officially ushered in the Chuck Norris: Martial-Arts Movie Icon era. He’s Major John T. Booker, the leader of a special-ops unit that’s nearly wiped out after being sent on a mission in the jungles of Vietnam. Booker and four of his fellow soldiers manage to make it out alive and return to the U.S. Several years later, however, someone seems hellbent on exterminating the survivors, and Booker has to figure out who it is before the assassins get to him. (“He once was a spy… now he must die!”) Norris may not have performed the film’s infamous flying kick into a car windshield, but the movie’s a perfect showcase for his fighting prowess. It made him a name-above-the-title star.

Good Guys Wear Black and its equally action-heavy follow-up, A Force of One (1979), proved that Norris was a bankable star. His first film of the Eighties — a decade that would be very good for his career — pitted Norris up with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly‘s Lee Van Cleef and ninjas. Lots and lots of ninjas. The “silent killers” have been recruited as a for-hire terrorist organization, and the only man to stop them is, naturally, Norris. He must eventually confront a host of enemies in the eight-sided arena of the title, including his character’s former best friend and foster brother. Norris! Cleef! Ninjas!!! Whaddaya need, a road map?

Norris had already started to transition from straight-up martial arts movies to crime thrillers that featured some karate showdowns as a bonus (or maybe an afterthought) in 1981’s An Eye for an Eye. That movie felt like a shaky trial run for expanding his genre-flick appeal; the one that followed, however, ironed out some of the bugs and helped sell Norris as more of an all-purpose action hero. He’s a small-town sheriff in Texas who’s used to breaking up biker-bar brawls. When one of his prisoners overpowers the local law-enforcement officers and escapes, it’s revealed that the man was part of a genetic experiment (!) that turned him into an “indestructible man” (!!!). It’s up to Norris to kick this mutant run amuck into submission. If anyone ever asks you what movies in the Eighties were like, just show them this trailer.

Part Western, part cop drama (“He’s a lone wolf lawman in the Lone Star state!”), and pure 100% pulp, this Norris star vehicle casts him as J.J. McQuade, a Texas Ranger with an unorthodox style of policing. He is indeed a lone wolf (with, no joke, an actual pet wolf) and a bit of a loose cannon, you might say — but damned if he doesn’t get the job done! And when his daughter is kidnapped by a drug warlord played by none other than David Carradine, he’ll have to use every bit of not-even-close-to-being-by-the-book style to rescue her. The mere fact that Norris was paired with the star of TV’s Kung Fu would be enough to single this film out, but it’s actually one of the stronger of Norris’s films and sells him as both a romantic lead and an old-fashioned maverick hero. If we had to introduce newbies to why Norris was a genuine B-movie star during this era, Lone Wolf McQuade would be the one we’d pick to show them. Bonus: It would end up inspiring Walker, Texas Ranger, a.k.a. the cornerstone of Norris’s legacy.

Sylvester Stallone may have cemented the ultimate P.O.W.-rescuing hero in Rambo: First Blood Part II — but Norris beat Sly to market with this story of Colonel James Braddock, a former of prisoner of war in ‘Nam who escaped and returned 10 years later to liberate several soldiers still being held in the camps. To be fair, an early script for the sequel to First Blood (written by none other than James Cameron) which involved Stallone’s hero on a similar mission had been circulating around Hollywood for a hot minute, but Norris got there first. No matter than Stallone’s film turned into one of the defining blockbusters of the decade; Missing in Action remains one of Norris’s best-known and biggest hits, and kicked off a bona fide franchise for the former martial arts champ.

This story of corrupt cops, Mob killings, and an antihero police officer who must bend the rules to dole out violent justice supposedly started life as a potential script for a Dirty Harry movie. Eventually, the location was changed from Harry’s stomping grounds of San Francisco to Chicago, and after a series of other actors passed, the project made its way to Norris. The result is what many consider to be the late actor’s best film, helped by the fact that Andrew Davis, future director of The Fugitive, was calling the shots. It works as both a straight cop drama, a crime thriller, and a martial-arts-adjacent action flick, and Norris knows how to play the character for maximum effect. It’s a great role for him. (Side note: We’re not saying that Stallone had a habit of following Norris’s lead. But check out these posters.)

After making one of the most jingoistic movies of all time — the Grade-Z Red Dawn rip-off Invasion U.S.A. (1985) — Norris rebounded with a men-on-a-mission potboiler that let him costar alongside no less than Lee Marvin. The whole cast reads like a Mad Libs version of an all-star ensemble from the back third of the 20th century (Shelly Winters, Martin Balsam, Joey Bishop, Robert Forster, George Kennedy, Robert Vaughn, and surprisingly, Fassbinder’s muse Hanna Schygulla). But make no mistake: This is very much a Chuck Norris movie. He’s Major Scott McCoy, the Delta Force’s second-in-command to Marvin’s Colonel Nick Alexander, and they’ve got to rescue hostages from a plane hijacked by terrorists. It feels like you’re watching one old-school action hero pass the baton to a younger one. And like the Missing in Action movies, this hit would begat a franchise, although Norris only appeared in the sequel. The star would go on to do a cut-rate takes on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1986’s Firewalker), The Karate Kid (1992’s Sidekicks) and Turner and Hooch (1995’s Top Dog) as well as his long-running TV series. This torn-from-the-headlines thriller makes for a great cap to the end of his big-screen heyday.