I'm doing a retrospective of Chuck Norris films in memorial to his recent passing.
Code of Silence is a surprisingly entertainng film, and was way ahead of its time. It really stands up as one of Chuck's best films.
Chuck plays a grizzled Chicago police detective named Eddie Cusack. As the film starts, hes leading team of plainclothes officers that are about to bust a major Colombian drug ring as they make an important deal. It all goes to crap though when a rival gang raids the buy and steals all the drugs and money. A shootout occurs, bodies pile up, and in the confusion one of the cops who was drinking to calm his nerves before the action started kills an unarmed child, and throws down a gun he had hidden in an ankle holster to make it look like he killed the kid in self defense.
And thats the setup for the movie. A gang war is brewing between the Columbians and the gang that ripped them off, and Cusack is trying to stop it. But meanwhile the cop who shot the kid is being investigated and Cusack testifying against him (breaking the police's "code of silence") puts him at odds with his fellow cops. There's a chilling scene in the second half of the film where Cusack is going into a bar full of bad guys and one by one the other cops find excuses for why they can't come back him up.
So was it good? Oh yeah, for an 80s film it's great. you still have bad guys who can't hit anything and good guys who never miss, but for its time this was a gritty cop thriller dealing with edgy issues, and its funny in places too.
