Code of Silence

Chuck Norris is a horrid actor, let's just get this out of the way. He's awful. The guy has no personality, and if he does, he's a master at hiding it. Usually, all we really see from Chuck is a sneer or a faint smile after delivering a well tailored comedy line of irony. He has this stoic expression at all times, in all of his films, usually of the very B picture variety.


But let me just say that Code of Silence is actually a very competent and decent film. Andrew Davis is an old pro director and he does things to the writing that tells the story commendably. Everything about the picture is solid. The action, the writing (which is sometimes a bit too complex with its many threads), and even the fusion jazz score helps with the gritty mood. But if I'm to praise something about the film as being its best component, it would be the comedy, and that is all because of Dennis Farina (Midnight Run, Manhunter). I knew right away that he wrote his own jokes. We see him hopping along on a pair of crutches after a pursuit. He's in a gym while his cop partner (Norris) is sparring. As he approaches Norris, a muscle bound personal trainer reaches for him to assist him with the crutches. Farina casually says "out of my way you side of beef". In a scene immediately after that, Norris asks Farina "how's the leg?"

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Farina injects enough comedy gold to give this film a badge of honor, and help with a distinction of it being the only Chuck Norris film that surrounds the man that is solid and right.

But I cannot give all of the credit to Farina. I also have to give credit to the obvious ringleader in Andrew Davis. A little side note but, I once had to work on a backyard project where all of the actors were bad. Their lines were stagy and the writing was cardboard. When I went to edit the film, I had no choice but to use some b-roll footage of the actors when the camera would be rolling but the scene wasn't being played out. The actors would just be reacting to the people around them, and as far as anyone knew, it was just social hour. I'd have to use a squinty eye of someone reacting to someone else dropping a plate of macaroni salad, and then take that reaction and thread it into the film-itself to give the scene more dramatic weight and make it seem like the actor "meant to react that way", even though I essentially stole a candid shot that worked within the context of the film. Andrew Davis does this constantly with Chuck Norris. Never do we see a dialog scene across an office desk with both actors in the frame. It's simply an over the shoulder shot for each man to deliver his lines. You can see when the "other" guy is talking that Chuck has these almost convincing dramatic reactions to what this dude is saying. But I knew it wasn't done in real time, or within the scene. I knew it was candids used to inject some legitimacy into Chuck's barren wasteland of emotional vocabulary.