This week, I was a guest on Ty and Brett’s Comeuppance Reviews Podcast talking about our favorite and not-so favorite Chuck Norris movies. You can hear the entire discussion here: The Chuck Wagon (podbean.com). To prepare for our chat, I went ahead and watched a couple of Chuck flicks that I somehow hadn’t got around to watching. Much to my surprise, that wasn’t many. (I still need to see An Eye for an Eye and Bells of Innocence, but other than that, I’ve seen them all.)
First up on my Chuck binge watch was Top Dog, and boy, is it a tonal nightmare from start to finish. It is a sorry retread of the Cop and his Dog Partner motif that was already mined by Turner and Hooch and K-9. It’s also got a little bit of the Mad Bomber plotline that was popular in the early ‘90s with such films as Speed, Blown Away, and Die Hard with a Vengeance. (There’s even a bomb-diffusing finale.) The fact that it premiered around the same time as the Oklahoma bombing further soured moviegoers on this, which for my money, has to be Chuck’s worst.
Reno the dog (himself) is one of the best cops on the force. When his partner is murdered by some white supremacists, he is saddled with a grumpy, slovenly cop named Jake Wilder (Chuck Norris). The mismatched pair eventually learn to accept each other on their own terms in order to stop the bad guys from blowing up “The Collation for Racial Unity”.
On the surface, Top Dog looks like a kid’s movie. The scenes of Chuck Norris and the pooch feel like something out of a Disney flick, and the comedic reaction shots of the dog whenever Chuck is fighting are particularly lame. Despite all the kid-friendly dog stuff, it is much too violent for most children and way too cutesy for fans of Chuck. Also, it features some rather despicable white supremacist villains who really feel out of place in a dumb film aimed at kids.
The stuff with Chuck getting to know the dog is painfully unfunny. The constant dog POV shots are especially hard to take. The action beats aren’t exactly bad, but just seem like they came out of a different movie. The subplot with Chuck and his nagging mother also feels like a set-up for a Stop or My Mom Will Shoot-style action-comedy that nobody asked for. Plus, it’s unnecessarily mean-spirited, which I’m sure will turn many viewers off. I mean the dog gets shot in the first five minutes! At least Turner and Hooch waited till the end to pull that shit.
I actually thought this film was pretty fun for what it was, tonally it was all over the place but I still found it enjoyable.
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