Breaker! Breaker! (1977)

Starring: Chuck Norris
Grade: D-

As far as Chuck Norris action movies go, Breaker! Breaker! is bottom tier.

Summary

In a small town, the townsfolk meet outside to hear from Judge Joshua Trimmings (George Murdock). A kid named Arney (John DiFusco) rides a bike into the center of it all to deliver a framed letter of sorts to Trimmings. Trimmings happily announces that the state of California has granted them a city charter. After the crowd cheers, he tells a story about his son, Howard Trimmings, known to all of them as “Tex”. Trimmings decided that he wanted the city to be dedicated to his name. From this day forward, Texas City, California has become official. Arlene Trimmings (Terry O’Connor) and her son Tony (David Bezar) seem to be the only two displeased with Trimmings and they leave the gathering.

J.D. Dawes (Norris) is a trucker going southbound on the 99. He’s talking to fellow truckers through the C.B. radio like “Ragman” and asks if he’s seen his brother Billy (Michael Augenstein). Ragman says Billy is hanging around the sickle park, a dirt bike park with a lot of people riding around. Dawes is there soon after and finds Billy driving. Eventually, Billy crashes off his bike. Dawes can’t help but smile at him once he takes off his helmet. After Billy challenges him to try a few laps and Dawes shakes his head, they go and talk. He welcomes Dawes home, they talk and mess around for a bit and then end up wrestling in the dirt in an unserious manner. Following this, Dawes drives Billy to a truck stop and tells him to go change his clothes. While he waits, Dawes greets Dotty. He looks inside her truck and sees her husband Jack in horrible condition. Dotty reveals Jack is paralyzed on his right side, as he got beat up by some guy named Strode (Don Gentry) in Texas City. Dotty has been driving Jack’s rig ever since he went into the hospital. She begins to weep into Dawes’s arms. He promises not to tell anyone. After this, Dawes lets Billy commandeer his truck. It’s Billy’s first solo run, so Dawes tries to give him some pointers. He knows Billy doesn’t like to be lectured by his big brother, but he wants Billy to watch the guys over at Shelley Foods and to not trust them because they’ll overload the reefer. He tells Billy to weigh the load before he puts it on the road. Apparently, he’s hauling TV dinners this go-around, which Billy is disgusted by. After both brothers sarcastially say the jingle (“If it’s from Shelley, it’s good for you belly!”), Billy heads out. Going by the callsign of “Diesel Dirt Biker”, he works the radio and talks with “Red Dog”, who gives him some advice on what pathway to take. Secretly, that’s Sgt. Strode. At a diner, Dawes sits with his friend Burton (Jack Nance) and asks what he knows about Strode.

Knowing Dawes saw what happened to Jack, Burton goes on about Strode being a “local smokey, over at that old bauxite ghost town. They call it Texas City”.

Apparently, they’ve been trying to get tourists in there recently. They set up after Dawes left the area, all legal and proper. Still, “You can’t run a box lunch through that town without giving everybody a bite”. They chew you up, turn you around, and spit you out. Waitress Pearl (Deborah Shore) walks over and jokingly questions if they talk about anything other than trucking. Burton says they do but jokes that they won’t in presence of a lady. Pearl asks Dawes why she associates with riffraff like Burton, so Dawes jokes that he’s writing an article about the lowlife on the 99. After they order their usuals, Elroy (David Stephen Essex) comes in from the billiards room and tells Dawes some guy in there thinks he can beat him. Dawes just got in, so he’s not feeling it. Elroy insists because Dawes is the champ, adding that this guy says he can beat Dawes in 10 seconds. Elroy says he bet the guy $10 he couldn’t do it just as Pearl gives them their food. Just then, fat, bald-headed, mesh shirt-wearing Kaminski (The Great John L.) comes over to Dawes’s table with his crew. One of them is wearing a pirate hat with a feather for some reason. Kaminski introduces himself and goes right into how he’s going to take him down. Dawes responds that he doesn’t want to take his money. Kaminski leans over the table, saying he will tear his head off if he doesn’t fight. Dawes asks if he can finish his lunch first, so Kaminski is fine with it. He takes his group to wait back in the pool room. Afterwards, Dawes comments that Kaminski had a good grip, so Burton reveals they call Kaminski “The Polish Angel” and comments how big his arms are. Pearl brings over the rest of their meal and mentions that what really counts is up in the head, getting a chuckle out of Dawes. Elsewhere, Billy is driving the rig and Deputy Boles (Ron Cedillos) pulls out right in front of Billy to stop him. Getting out of the car, Boles goes over and tells Billy there has been a big accident up ahead and says he has to take the detour. Billy can see the road from there and isn’t confident he can make it, but Boles says he will have to. Otherwise, he will have to go back. Not having any other choice, Billy goes along with it.

Of course, he finds himself driving straight into “The Friendliest Town in the West”, Texas City. Almost immediately, Billy is pulled over by Strode.

At the diner, the guys in the pool room are already taking bets. As Pearl and newbie waitress deal with argumentative truckers, Pearl tries to calm down her co-worker because truckers only care about how fast their trucks go, how far their C.B.’s will reach, and “your ass and my ass”. In Texas City, Billy is at the police station, and he is told his rig is being impounded because it might get hijacked if they leave it on the road. Billy brings up how it’s a perishable load, so they need to keep the cooler on. However, Strode doesn’t care and gets mad Billy is trying to tell him what to do. He’s taken over to the Justice Court where Trimmings and Boles show up for an immediate trial. As they get things started, Trimmings hands Boles a fly swatter for the fly in the room, which gets a chuckle from Billy. Trimmings brings up Billy’s charges of speeding, failure to post a shipper’s name in the proper place, failure to keep a log, driving an overweight truck, and resisting arrest. Billy can’t believe what he’s hearing and calls it all a pack of lies. He points out how he was just driving down Highway 120 and Boles pulled out in front of him, which nearly caused him to jackknife his rig, and he was told he had to take this road into Trimmings’ town. Adding to this, he insists he wasn’t speeding. Strode demands he answer Trimmings, Trimmings calls for order, and Boles hits the fly. In the pool room at the diner, Dawes and Kaminski have their arm-wrestling match with all the truckers and Pearl cheering them on. Just as Dawes is about to win, one of Kaminski’s guys purposely bumps into Pearl to bump into them and Kaminski claims interference. Everyone argues and Kaminski uses the distraction to punch Dawes out of his chair. Naturally, this erupts into a huge fight with everyone in the room getting involved. After Dawes takes out Kaminski, he tells Elroy to never get him into something like this ever again and then has Burton come with him because he needs a ride.

Back in Texas City, Billy tells Trimmings this is a racket rather than a town, which offends him. Trimmings goes on about how Billy is an outsider who misinterprets what he’s seeing, he doesn’t understand and is critical because of it, and how he regrets not having the time to show Billy the many industries and enterprises the city allows. Billy laughs at these series of audacious lies. Nevertheless, Trimmings finds Billy guilty as charged. Billy has to either pay a $250 fine or serve 250 days. Billy can’t believe it and refuses to go along with it. He grabs Strode’s nightstick, hits Boles, shoves off Strode, avoids another guy, and jumps out the glass window to escape. Bleeding from his face from the glass, Billy tries to run away and stumbles. He tries to get the attention of a local business owner who is watching everything and begs for his help, but the guy just stands there. There is no place to run. The whole town is on the side of Trimmings. Billy continues to run but finds himself at a dead end. Strode and Boles corner him. Elsewhere in a private session, Dawes works on training students for martial arts. He talks about how meditation is essential to martial arts training, and it’s imperative you develop yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually. To do so, you have to concentrate on the “third eye”. He has them close their eyes to focus on the center, noting how they will notice it becoming brighter and brighter. As he gets their total concentration on the third eye, they are interrupted by a phone call from Burton. He checked with the highway patrol about Billy. There is no record of any accident. Dawes checked with the scale master at the station, and they said Billy didn’t show up. He suggests Billy may have taken a side road to Highway 5, probably 120. Burton realizes the problem. This could be the work of Texas City since they work the side roads. He tells Dawes to be careful if he goes over there because they have their own kind of laws. Plus, Strode works the front and Boles works the back.

Dawes will handle it though. Even after taking his van out there and gets shot at by moonshiners upon getting close, there is nothing that will stop Dawes from infiltrating Texas City to find Billy.

My Thoughts:

We love Chuck Norris, we love action movies, and more than anything, we love cheesy action movies. However, Chuck’s first film as the headliner is arguably his worst. Noticeably low budget, directed like a television movie, and filled with a cast that scrapes the bottom of the barrel, Breaker! Breaker! may succeed with the niche trucker demographic but not many others outside of that will give it a pass.

You can tell the quality of a Chuck Norris action movie based off the evolution of his facial hair. When Norris had his full beard, he was in peak form. Mustached Chuck was hit-or-miss. However, the era of “Beardless Chuck” was the action star at his worst and least experienced. Thankfully for fans of action cinema, this era didn’t last too long. Still, Breaker! Breaker! can be difficult to sit through at times. Chuck tries his best to act natural, but it’s a performance that legitimately looks like he’s learning as he goes. Plus, it’s kind of a hard sell to believe that this good looking, clean-cut, sunshine blonde is a rough trucker. No one is doubting Chuck Norris’s ability as a fighter, but him portraying a trucker with the way he looks here isn’t nearly as believable as it needs to be. Then again, maybe J.D. Dawes is entirely a different breed of trucker. After all, the random insertion of the scene where he’s teaching martial arts and mediation to an unknown group of students in a secluded location is as out-of-place as it gets, though intentional to a degree to show why he’s able to take on so many people in Texas City when the time comes for it. Had they played into this more, with all the other truckers noting how peculiar of a guy Dawes is with his mediation and knowledge as a black belt, they could have had seriously developed this protagonist and made him a unique hero, which would have masked Chuck’s underwhelming performance a lot more. Outside of the action scenes where Chuck Norris thrives, there is one thing that does translate with the actor’s performance, however. He is likable as Dawes. He has a face for the big screen, has a presence to him even if took him a few years to truly hone it, and there is a genuine quality to him that attracts the viewer. Dawes does seem like a goodhearted guy, and Arlene being attracted to his kind personality upon meeting him at the diner worked in context.

The two getting intimate did seem rushed and unnecessary when the grand scheme of things are taken into account, but the attraction between them does come off as authentic because Dawes is a shining light in this town that’s hard to ignore. Even though no one is buying John DiFusco’s terrible performance as disabled stutterer Arney, Dawes helping Arney by flipping the tire over and showing him how to take off the rim properly puts a smile to your face due to his warm presence. In addition, there is something about Dawes being straight to the point that was an enjoyable trait. When he meets Trimmings and Trimmings drunkenly rambles about “time in the face of truth”, Dawes just asks him if he’s wasting his time talking to him. Once he continues, Dawes just checks out. His lack of patience regarding assholes is a very likable quality for our action hero protagonist. I like how George doesn’t even offer a delivery service, but Dawes demands it because of the price he has to pay for the new radiator and threatens him to ensure he will do so, resulting in George just backing down and doing what he asked. That was great. Only Chuck Norris could do something like that. Besides that, his inexperience as an actor shows everywhere else like when he has a nightmare of Billy being shot and comically yells, “BILLY!” as he wakes up.

To the film’s credit, the handling of Dawes isn’t that bad overall. It’s just that the creators behind the production have an obvious lack of experience. First of all, if you’re making an action movie and want to keep it focused on the main star beating people up, the third act needs to be worthy of the buildup. This is the most frustrating part about Breaker! Breaker! other than its horrific title. They spend a majority of the running time building up Judge Trimmings, Strode, and Boles as a trio of the most despicable human beings that I’ve seen in quite a while in an action flick. They actually do too good of a job at making the viewer despise these three men. Seriously, I cannot stress this enough. In every succeeding scene, they are so over-the-top in their villainy that the audience is practically begging for Chuck Norris to beat the absolute dogshit out of all three of them. We’re not talking Chuck twisting an arm or two either. The arrogant Trimmings deserved a curb stomp in the vein of American History X. That is how much the sweaty George Murdock’s scenery-chewing performance makes the audience’s blood boil. As frustrating as it is to watch in that regard however, this is okay. This is how you design an action movie like this, no matter the budget. If the filmmaker can build a villain and his henchmen that well and garner a legitimate feeling of hatred towards the antagonistic side of things, it makes the job that much easier when it’s time to let the action hero do his thing and give what they have coming to them. Murdock is so terribly good in his role, that the viewer is pleading for Chuck Norris’s J.D. Dawes to rip his head off and subsequently tear this town apart person by person. You know how in Doom, the main character just mows every alien he sees at 100 mph? That is what was needed here. In the best action sequence of the movie, we get a taste of it, as Dawes kicks open the door at the courthouse to approach Judge Trimmings.

After Trimmings plays coy to Dawes’s accusations and even says he has a room full of people there who are going to deny whatever he thinks happened, Dawes demands to know where his brother is. For the record, Norris completely botches the delivery of the line, giving 50% of the intensity he should have had stating such an emphatic point. Nevertheless, Dawes refuses to go to the police department until he finds out where Billy is, so Trimmings has all the men in the room move the chairs out of the way and circle Dawes. Dawes kicks the gun out of the one guy’s hand, fights a few of them off, runs outside, and leaps through a hole in the roof to temporarily hide himself. Once Trimmings sends all the men out to find Dawes and he exits the courthouse while drinking his flask, Dawes drops down from the roof directly in front of him. After Trimmings gives him credit for his imaginative escape, he yells for Strode to get Dawes, prompting Dawes to run off. What follows is exactly what we came to see. Individually, double digit men come at Dawes, and he takes out every last one of them in a highly satisfying sequence (“Guy’s a bad dude. He’s punched out half the town”). Considering how much hate we harbor for Texas City and its inhabitants at this point in the story, we don’t want it to end, and the fight choreography provided by Chuck Norris himself is excellent. Really, this movie may have succeeded if the rest of the running time was Dawes just kicking every last citizen’s ass until he found Billy. Sadly, they had to include the obligatory temporary escape, love scene, car chase, and eventual return. What’s troubling is that the movie never gets back to this level of action or intensity provided in this elongated sequence. Once Arlene calls in the truckers to help save the day and it sounds like a thunderstorm is erupting, we think it’s going to be a balls-to-the-wall finale where everyone gets their comeuppance in the most violent way possible. Sadly, it just never gets there (SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS).

Wade accidentally shoots his handicapped brother Arney after initially clipping Dawes, and then he just decides to have a change of heart and reveals Billy’s location. Then, despite the town being loudly destroyed, Boles decides it’s time to beat up Billy while he’s in captivity simply for the fuck of it. Why he decides that this is the perfect time to do this is beyond explanation. Once Dawes shows up and kicks Boles through a wall, he hugs Billy. Having the perfect opportunity to just shoot them both, Boles watches them hug and inexplicably runs. For someone who is born and bred in evil up until this point, this didn’t make sense from a character standpoint as to why Boles didn’t capitalize on the one time Dawes was occupied. Is it because he had a change of heart like Wade? No, this can’t be it because he tries to stab Dawes with a meat hook one scene later, which begs the question again as to why he didn’t do anything when he had the chance. In the worst decision of the movie, Dawes spends the climax fighting the tertiary villain in a one-on-one battle that is treated like the main event. Complete with cheesy, spaghetti western closeups between the two, and the entirety of it being shot in slow motion, it’s a one-sided ass kicking. Once Boles gets the broken bottle of Wild Turkey knocked out of his hand and misses the dirt throw, he gets destroyed easily. Despite this, he calls Dawes a son of a bitch to try and goad him to turn around. Overreacting to a comical degree to an insult most of us use daily while in traffic, Dawes responds as if Boles cursed his dead family and hits Boles with a drop kick that sends him to the ground. For some reason, his running and jumping is cut back and forth with the nearby horse running around, as if it’s this philosophical moment, but the idea is executed so poorly that it’s funny. After all of this, the horse leaps over the fence, there’s a freeze frame, and then it transitions to a few shots of Texas City on fire. It practically demands the viewer ask, “What the fuck was that?”.

Not only does Dawes waste his time on the least important villain of the trio, but nothing really happens to Strode, someone who they began the first act talking about how he paralyzed some poor bastard named Jack. All Strode does in the third act is set up a roadblock that the truckers drive straight through. The man should be tarred and feathered! What are we doing? This wasn’t enough! Even worse is that the tyrannical Trimmings doesn’t even get 10% of what he should have received. For someone who should be publicly hung, dragged onto the street by Dawes and his trucker friends and beaten to death, or simply been given the same treatment as Alonzo Harris from Training Day, his house getting drove through by a semitruck while he’s in bed with his wife was not good enough. Something grizzlier needed to happen to him comparable with bitch ass, unibrow-donning George at the wrecking yard. Why would someone think this was an acceptable end to Trimmings’s character arc, especially without the protagonist or the protagonist’s brother getting to punch him at least one time? Guys, this is “Action Movie 101”. They cannot fail this very basic requirement, but they still managed to do so. You can’t have a scene where Trimmings breaks into Arlene’s house, they openly discuss Trimmings being responsible for Howard’s death due to his corruption, Trimmings holding Arlene’s son Tony and forcing him onto his lap while he interrogates the child in the middle of Arlene screaming at him, and him telling Tony that he is going to live with him moving forward, without Trimmings getting brutally murdered by the end of the film. Anything less is unacceptable. It goes without saying that he needed to be beaten down, but not getting ANY physical bodily harm after everything he does in this movie?!

No, we can’t bypass that.

To his credit, life-long character actor George Murdock was the obvious veteran in the cast, and he nailed his role as the dishonorable Judge Trimmings. He spouts his nonsensical rants like Shakespeare and relishes in playing this diabolical villain who can sentence someone to death at the drop of a hat like Texas City is a pseudo ancient Rome. He gets a lot out of a film that would be forgettable otherwise. It’s too bad that there is an overwhelming number of god-awful moments in-between that stops Murdock from getting his proper credit like Arney hugging a disgusting stuffed animal as he cries or Trimmings’s wife sounding like a robot. I’m not saying her performance was wooden either. She legit sounded like a robot.

Other details to the screenplay are perplexing. For example, why did Wade yell at Arney about him showing Dawes the tires he was working on? Dawes didn’t care at all, and there was no payoff regarding it. We already know the city is involved in corrupt business practices, so this is not a big deal whatsoever. Furthermore, what the hell was up with that bar with the creepy bartender and all of the dolls and puppets? It worked in being unsettling, but any kind of information regarding that bartender would have been welcomed to explain what the fuck was going on with her. In a smaller scene, Wade tells Strode and Boles that Dawes came in through the canyon and Strode comments, “Shit!”. Why is this a big deal? What is up with the canyon? They know Dawes is an outsider to begin with, so what does it matter what area he drove in from? It literally has nothing to do with the events of the movie, and nothing is explained further regarding why this is a big deal. There’s just too many of these inexplicable moments to ignore. Another great example is when Wade overhears the moonshiners talking shit about Arney being stupid. He tells both of them sternly how he never wants to hear that again. Weirdly enough, the camera focuses in on Wade after he says it, but he is smiling. This is just flat-out the wrong expression to have following a discussion in which he’s yelling at people for making fun of his handicapped brother. The chase scene was okay, but the suspension of disbelief was almost completely lost when Dawes is able to drive his bulky van (with a bald eagle painted on it no less) up a steep hill, but the regular-sized squad cars aren’t able to do so and lose him. The same could be said for the car part George uses to knock Dawes out, which looked and sounded like cardboard, and the obviously male stunt driver playing Arlene in the dirt bike chase scene. At least we got that moment before it where Dawes takes Strode and Boles out in a two-on-one fight before he gets out of there. That was solid.

As it can be the case with action movies from time to time, the funniest scene of the movie was an unintentional one. After Dawes talks to Burton on the phone about how there is something going on in Texas City that is more than a speed trap, Arlene can see Dawes’s somber expression. She asks if it’s bad news or has something to do with Texas City, adding that she doesn’t have any ties to the place (a total lie) so she can tell Dawes what he wants to know. What follows is this montage of the two walking and talking with a love song playing. The viewer can only hear bits and pieces of their conversation as Arlene tells her life story to him. Finally, Dawes gets to the point and asks Arlene what happened to Billy since that’s really all we care about. After all of this, she just goes, “I don’t know”. The timing of it was hilarious. You couldn’t have set this up any better to elicit laughter because of how abrupt it is following such an elongated montage of romance, meaningless backstory, and nonsense. It was hysterical.

We can’t harp too much on the budgetary restrictions because it’s not fair. Sometimes, you have to make with what you got. Considering how the narrative plays out in combination with the small budget, the controlled set design and western production values do actually work within the small story. They get a lot of mileage out of the very little they have, so they do deserve credit there. Furthermore, they do a good job with world-building Texas City as this small town that has its own set of rules and goes unnoticed by the public because of its size (see another example like Dan Aykroyd’s Nothing but Trouble). Behind Judge Trimmings, who is the magistrate of Texas City but could be described as an emperor, the world they create on the side of the road in the larger California area is well done. When you set up a premise like this, a suspension of disbelief is required, and Breaker! Breaker! does a great job at this, all things considered. Their ways of industry like with stealing cars and reselling them, giving higher-priced menus to outsiders at their local diner, moonshining, and just taking advantage of novice outsiders by handing out tickets like candy at Halloween is fairly believable with how its presented, as is the constant presence of police brutality administered by Strode and Boles. Adding this with Wilfred being the town’s eye in the sky with his helicopter, you can see why they rule this place with an iron fist.

Wilfred trying to escape in the helicopter but not getting it started in time, allowing for the semitruck to drive through it in the climax was great though. Not so tough now, are you pussy?

Chuck Norris wasn’t bad in his first starring role, and the action is solid too. Truthfully, it was fun seeing the legend wage war with an entire town. Unfortunately, Breaker! Breaker! builds the negativity to such an obscene level, that the level of action violence in the payoff is about a quarter of what it should be, completely botching the finish of an already amateurish production. It has flashes of potential, but we have seen Chuck in much better.