Thoughts on Excessive Force

I enjoyed watching a low-budget action movie from 1993 called Excessive Force, where Thomas Ian Griffith (best known as the villain from The Karate Kid Part III) plays a Chicago cop out to take down a local crime boss that keeps evading convictions, Gotti-style. I am such a sucker for gritty old B action movies, wailing electric guitar soundtracks, and guys in trench coats doing martial arts in warehouses and back alleys at night, so I dug this a lot.

Griffith had a lot of charisma and a streetwise vibe to him, and he wrote the film, which was pretty solid. He also had great chemistry with some heavyweight actors like Lance Henriksen and James Earl Jones, having such a natural ease with them that is difficult to come by.

For a low-budget movie, this film had a great cast, including Burt Young as the ruthless crime boss DeMarco and Tony Todd as a fellow cop. The weak link in the cast was Charlotte Lewis (The Golden Child, Embrace of the Vampire), who is just cast as a love interest and has an underwritten role that isn’t as dynamic as the male roles were. She just seemed pretty blah and boring, both as a fault of the poor writing and her flat acting.

Lance Henriksen was one of the best things about this film. He just has this crazy intensity that makes him feel so chilling, and he’s got this great gravelly voice that he can use to intimidating effect. He just brings this higher level to any film he’s in, and he’s been in a lot of low-budget films that are lucky to have his presence in it. I’ve been into him since I was a teen watching Millennium, and he’s one of the most unique and interesting actors I’ve ever seen in films.

I tend to really like movies set in Chicago, and this film really utilized the city to its strengths, with scenes shot at courthouses and government buildings for day scenes, and a lot of night scenes at bars or under trains or in side streets.

The film also focuses a lot on corruption between cops and the mob, linking how dirty cops profit from and excuse mob activity, and there likely is a lot of truth to that. I really liked how the film would explore different sides of that, like dirty cops who excuse what they do as family traditions in the force, to shady cops who don’t want to betray their fellow officers even while in league with the mob, and clean cops who don’t know who to trust anymore. It definitely had some depth that I wasn’t expecting, so I appreciated that.

I had heard of this movie ages ago from its trailer, narrated by the legendary Don LaFontaine, and showing pretty much all the best parts of the movie. This really made me want to check it out, and I’m happy I did.