Review of A Force of One (1979) by Timothy S — 27 Dec 2013

Nobody is ever going to accuse Chuck Norris of being a good actor, but the majority of his films during his heyday were immensely profitable and popular. I always preferred to watch him battle with his fists and feet rather than with a gun or a tank, and his second major film as a star, "A Force Of One", sure has plenty of that to offer.

The fights were all choreographed by the Norris brothers, Chuck and his younger sibling Aaron, and the sequences in the ring are all fun to watch. They take you back to a time when the sport was young and novel, before too many faceless action stars came along and ruined it. However, the fights that take place outside of the ring all feel clumsy and uncoordinated.

The story is a simple one (as with most Norris films), and there are a few surprises along the way but it does its one and only job of successfully securing its star as a new box office draw. He doesn't have much charisma in this (which kind of became his trademark), but it's amusing watching him work. The violence is refreshingly kept to a minimum, and there are a handful of laughs along the way as well.

I wanted to like "A Force Of One" a lot more than I did, but the action is only sporadic and sometimes hard to swallow when we do get it. Chuck feels like he's mostly testing the waters here, and the rest of the cast is pretty bland as well. It's a serviceable introduction to the world of karate, but other than that, there's not much special about it.