American Hunter aka Lethal Hunter (1988)

This week’s pick for the Fridays of Fury Action Club comes courtesy of member MushiMinion. Join the fun with past and upcoming selections here.

American Hunter aka Lethal Hunter (1988) starts off with some strong silliness, as a guy drives a jeep through the side of an office building and starts spraying submachine gun fire everywhere before we have established anything other than a macguffin (a microfilm). Soon after that our hero Jake Carver (Christopher Mitchum) smacks a dude in an office chair so hard he spins around in a circle, then the guy pulls a gun and Jake flips off the office wall to dodge the shot and kick him.

It's all cheap and sloppy, but it has a stupid energy that I immediately enjoyed. The rest of the movie has the same disregard for narrative as it bounces between that kind of fun nonsense and less energetic low budget action that leads to some dull stretches. There are no actual characters in this movie, but the bad guy played by Bill “Superfoot” Wallace does enough kicking that he earns that credit. He (or whoever dubbed him) also has a hilarious evil laugh that keeps going and turns into a giggle, then a chuckle, and had me dying of laughter myself. I also noticed one of my new favorite recurring movie thugs, crazy-eyed muscle-bound Mike Abbott (last seen in City Hunter, most memorably seen dangling a little girl out of a moving car in Fatal Termination).

I'd recognize that thousand yard stare anywhere!

Late in the movie, Mike will aggressively make out with a woman while taunting Bill and his monkey.

when Bill puts his monkey down, you know that it's Superfoot time!

The movie as a whole is summed up pretty well by the director’s credit that appears as white text over the image of a car wreck and a building with white columns that makes his name unreadable:

The awesomely named Arizal was a prolific Indonesian director who cranked out a couple action cheapies with Western “stars” in the 1980s. That includes another Chris Mitchum flick, Final Score (1986), and The Stabilizer (1986), which gets my vote for least exciting action hero title ever. Do you have a wobbly table giving you trouble? Call… The Stabilizer! 

These days they make the Mission Impossible movies by conceptualizing, location scouting, then filming the stunts and large-scale action set pieces first. While they are shooting that stuff, they write a script for the story scenes to film later, followed by re-shoots as necessary to (hopefully) try and fill any holes in the narrative. American Hunter feels like a movie that shot all its small-scale action set pieces first (including two dingy rooms I thought were the same place until my wife pointed out that one was filled with straw and the other seemed to be set-dressed with shredded paper). Then they filmed 10 minutes of dialogue scenes talking about the microfilm macguffin, inserted them haphazardly to create a "story" and called it a day. Honestly, I remember and care just as little about recent Mission Impossible plots as I did this movie, they just have more talent and money to throw at their nonsense plots.

zooming along to the next action scene

Everyone is after Janet (Ida Iasha) because they think she has the microfilm that could crash Wall Street or some such shit. Jake meets Janet for about 5 seconds. Then after some action scenes, Jake tells his partner he has a date with Janet… cut directly to them in bed together and Janet saying she is falling in love with Jake! Then the bad guys immediately try to kidnap her, she is rescued and ends up in the hospital, where she is safe exactly long enough for us to watch a helicopter land very slowly outside the hospital with some guys who kidnap her again! The storytelling goes beyond streamlined and feels like there are whole pages missing. I don’t know if that was a budget/production issue or just a director who wasn’t interested in any scenes that didn’t involve kicks or car crashes. The bad guys attack! Then the good guys attack back! Then the bad guys attack again! It definitely reminded me of how I wrote comics as a small child, or how Rob Liefeld wrote comics as a grown man.

this looked real and dangerous

When the movie is delivering surprisingly silly or dangerous stunts and action beats, it's good. When it is stumbling or skipping over plot and character beats, it can be bad in an entertaining way. The problem comes during the many action scenes that are dull or prolonged. Ironically, any time two vehicles are in motion the movie grinds to a halt. The chase scenes are snore-inducing, with no drama or escalation until they inevitably end in a random crash. There is a slight feeling of danger to some of the low-speed car chases, but that is more in the meta sense because it looks like they just shot them around unknowing civilians wandering the streets! An interminable helicopter chase is the worst offender. Fight scenes can also become repetitive and drag on, but usually they at least have the decency to constantly send people smashing through random objects for our entertainment (there were moments in this where I thought about playing Dark Souls and my insatiable need to smash every pot or piece of furniture around me).

Unfortunately, the dull stuff makes up a decent amount of the runtime here. This is definitely a movie that benefits from having someone to joke around with while you watch it. The energy level started high. My wife and I both said, “This is awesome!” in the opening minutes, but by the end her attitude changed to “that was rough.” I enjoyed it a little more, but I definitely think this is a movie that would benefit from Rifftrax or a highlight reel of just the fun bits. There are a number of crazy, dumb, or what-the-fuck moments here, but it doesn’t hit frequently or hard enough to be a good-bad classic like The Miami Connection or a secretly awesome bad flick like Superfights (which I almost picked as my selection for the FoF Action Club this month!). This is also yet another 1980s action movie that features torture by electricity, but unlike Tango & Cash this movie had the balls to add blue lightning effects!

Chris Mitchum is the son of Hollywood legend and cool motherfucker Robert Mitchum. On the scale of nepo-baby actor Chrises, Chris Mitchum is slightly more believable in action than Chris Lemmon (Jack Lemmon’s son and star of Firehead and Thunder in Paradise). Chris Mitchum is less believable here any time he has to open his mouth. Even Chris Lemmon’s warmed over Kevin Pollak energy brought more to the table in dialogue scenes than Chris Mitchum’s non-presence here. Of course, this is my only Chris Mitchum movie so it's possible that he is better when he works with a director that cares about things like story, character, or acting!

Read the other Club members' reviews here