The Evil That Men Do (1984)

There is nothing more sad or more irritating than witnessing a fall from greatness: that is, a toppling from the pillar of perfection that is so common with our celluloid heroes.

So many of the good guys we associate with filmic good times have three things in common - they never miss their target, they always defeat the bad guys and they won't appear in just any dog-eared run-of-the-mill piece of junk that could have just as easily been contracted out to the studio's second-or-third string Andy Sidaris beefcake model-looking also-rans.

(now there's a run-on sentence.)

Anyway, John Wayne is a good example of such a hero. So is Clint Eastwood. So is Chuck Norris. So is Gary Cooper. And so, for a while at least, was Charles Bronson.

Like many of our previously mentioned examples, Bronson started out small in bit parts, worked up to war pictures, did the prerequisite Westerns and had a breakthrough role that cemented his career. Wayne's was Stagecoach. Eastwood's was The Good The Bad And The Ugly. Norris' was Breaker! Breaker!. Cooper's was The Virginian. And Bronson, well...his was that classic every red-blooded, knowledgeable movie fan knows and loves - Death Wish.

For it was in this film that Bronson essayed the character that became synonymous with his name: the vigilante. Righter of wrongs. Protector of the downtrodden. World-weary defeater of evil. Guns, knives, speeding cars, he used them all to terrorize any murderer, mugger, rapist or other such despoiler of good. ...okay, maybe guns more than anything else.

Then it happened as it does to any other such actor: Bronson became - brace yourself - typecast. Yes, Virginia: he became typecast as the same vigilante character (in theory) as he did from 1974 on. Oh sure, he was in some far more impressive films before like The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven and Once Upon A Time in the West and made a departure every so often in films like From Noon To Three. But he also was in a bunch of carbon copies of his previous Death Wish success. In fact, he was in 10 To Midnight, Murphy's Law, Assassination, Messenger of Death, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects and four more Death Wish sequels.

And whereas Wayne, Eastwood, et al rose above such typecasting and even used it to their advantage career-wise, Bronson appeared so bound, so downtrodden and predisposed to his fate that he wearily trudged through the same old thing over and over again without a glimmer of hope, nuance or difference from movie to movie.

Just slap him on a poster holding a gun, the rest of the movie wrote itself.

We can't completely blame Bronson for this gradual downhill slide, however. The biggest perps in Case #272: The Murder of Charles Bronson's Career can be traced directly to two men: Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.

Yes, you know them. Golan-Globus. The studio that released 90% of all movies in the Eighties. They killed more careers than Cecil B. DeMille. And they sure did a number on Bronson, releasing practically every movie with his name on it from 1980 through 1989.

You want to know the only reason they DIDN'T release The Evil That Men Do? Because they couldn't afford to. Yep, so they got in talks with Tri-Star Pictures, who agreed to pick up the tab and take over the reins for the thing and get it out into theaters. What nice guys. Really. Thing is, you can't tell that this wasn't a Golan-Globus production from the looks of it.

No matter that this was based on a book (by R. Lance Hill). No matter it featured some otherwise dependable actors, whom I'll get to humiliating in due time. No matter it was directed by a man who was once THE action director others would look to for quality product. And certainly no matter that one of the producers was Jill Ireland...and yes, that's our star's wife! This movie wouldn't have cut it as a Stallone / Schwarzenegger team-up written by Shane Black and directed by John McTiernan.

I'll get into all the reasons this movie stinks, but first things first.

Boom, goes the plot: Holland (Bronson) is a retired killer-for-hire who is informed that an old friend of his was killed trying to assassinate doctor Clement Moloch (Joseph Maher). Molloch works clandestinely for many governments who want insurgents dealt with by any means of torture. After initial hesitation, Holland accepts the task and goes undercover in Guatemala as a family man, accompanied by Rhiana (Theresa Saldana), the wife of his murdered friend, and her daughter. Noticing Moloch is heavily protected, Holland systematically eliminates his protective circle until all that is left is his intended target...with much fire hose-hanging, electrocuting and testicle crushing along the way.

Not only is this a pretty distasteful and grimy piece of tripe, but the fact that anyone thought this was a worthy film for Charles Bronson to star in only speaks to dollar signs rather than acting opportunities. In fact, the most explosive part of this film is from a car bomb early on.

This was directed by J. Lee Thompson, a formidable talent who actually lensed such worthwhile actioners as The Guns of Navarone and Cape Fear. He was no slouch in these, but remember that he was also the man responsible for directing John Goldfarb Please Come Home!, The Greek Tycoon and Happy Birthday To Me. There's every indication that this was a project taken just to pass the time until something good came along. Unfortunately, Thompson's later career would consist of other teamings with Bronson before the camera - at least nine altogether - and most of them were as dreary and predictable as this.

Writers David Lee Henry and John Crowther seem to be familiar with assembling clichés, surrounding them with stereotypes and wrapping it all up in bad taste as they demonstrate here - in spite of the fact that one of them wrote Road House and the other wrote that lesser-known kung-fu classic Kill and Kill Again. Thing is, you can only adapt so much before you realize that it all looks like the same spoiled piece of fish, only wrapped in a different piece of newspaper.

You saw names in the plot rundown such as Maher, who was far more effective in comic roles and lighter fare such as Sister Act, Funny Farm and...alright, I'll say it...and Under the Rainbow. He was far better in those than here as a passive-aggressive expert in torture.

Theresa Saldana had good, impressive roles in I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Raging Bull and, after a deranged "fan" attacked her with a knife in the early Eighties, she bravely struggled through and rehabilitated herself back - but as a harried, distraught widow, she doesn't really get much of an opportunity to act as she does sit around, act scared or repulsed and at least gets to slap Bronson around once. Other than that, nothing much.

Raymond St, Jacques plays a bodyguard, too. Raymond St. Jacques. Raymond "Black Like Me, The Pawnbroker, Cotton Comes To Harlem, The Comedians, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover , The Green Berets" St. Jacques. Here, a bi-sexual bodyguard who gets a knife in the throat after five minutes of screen time. Greeeeeaaaat.

And José Ferrer as a...yes, José Ferrer is in a Charles Bronson Death Wish copy. That is the saddest sentence I've ever written in my life. Let's move on....

Then there's the fact that we also have various actors like René Enriquez, John Glover, Antoinette Bower and Joe Seneca who do little to nothing but whom we all know are capable of better (even Bower, despite being in films like this, Time Walker and Prom Night).

This all leads us back to the fact that Charles Bronson is in this movie, acting as lethargic and disinterested as he ever has. What some mistook for cool and calm in his later movies actually looks more like boredom and ennui at having to yet again play Paul Kersey - albeit under a different name, in a different script and with different situations...but worse writing and direction all the way around, every go-around.

What was with The Evil That Men Do? Why did Bronson agree to be in it? Was it a contract deal? Did he break a mirror? What?

I think the easiest explanation as to why Bronson was in this movie was that this kind of movie is the only one that anyone thought he was worth casting in. He's Charles Bronson, we can't cast him in a rom-com or a family drama - no one would ever believe it. Give Joe Public his dose of Bronson shootin' stuff up and that's all he needs. Character and nuance are for wusses: killin' and blowin' stuff up - THAT'S what I'm talkin' about.

And the sad thing is that this explanation probably isn't too far off from Tri-Star's reasoning as to picking this up with Bronson at the lead. Keep the movie-going public happy, give them what they want, what they expect and give it to them as often as possible, and you can just forego any scripting. For as sad and cynical as this is, it is only compounded by the fact that this $4.6 million flick earned back over $13 million because of the fact that it did, indeed, star Charles Bronson.

This is the same thing that they did with Burt Reynolds and Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal: cast them in the same movies repeatedly without any change at all so that they earn money until people are sick of them and then discard them for the next Flavor of the Month. It's a sad, unseemly yet inevitable happenstance for any actor who wants to go anywhere with what they do. The producers, if they're bound and determined to misread public demand and recast you as the same guy in different movies...well, you're pretty much screwed.

Of course, being recast as the same kind of character in different movies seems to work for a lot of actors. Just look at Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell. But it usually works best if there's a little self-awareness mixed in with their script. Does it make sense that self-awareness has little to nothing to do with The Evil That Men Do? Yes, as a matter fact it does.

When Charles Bronson died in 2003, many people ran down their own personal lists of films he was most famous and/or beloved for. Every one of those lists, as you can well imagine, contained Death Wish.

Very few of those lists contained The Evil That Men Do. But as far as that goes, very few of those lists mentioned the fact that part of being a legend is being in films that no one else would touch, even if they WERE Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris.