Code of Silence

When Chuck Norris died a little while ago I watched Lone Wolf McQuade again. This is one of the top ranked Chuck Norris movies on IMDB. After this I also watched Code of Silence again. This movie is from the same period and has similar ratings. It gets a higher score than the well known Missing in Actions movie series and rightly so. In Code of Silence Chuck Norris plays a Chicago cop who gets caught in the middle of a gang war between Italian and Columbian drug maffia clans. He ends up facing them alone because his colleagues turn his back on him after he testifies against one of them in a hearing after having shot an unarmed kid. There is a nice fight sequence in a bar where Norris fights it out with a whole gang of Columbian hoodlums. This is definitely one of the better Chuck Norris movies with Norris doing what he does best: not a lot of talking but throwing all the more kicks and punches. Despite all the fighting and shooting there is also a little bit of a story and some drama involved. Chuck Norris was one of the first American martial arts movie stars I got to know. His multiple karate world champion titles gave his no nonsense fight scenes some credibility. Afterwards the world got to know Asian martial arts starts like Jet Li and Donnie Yen that were certainly more athletic and acrobatic but their movies also have a royal dose of magic physical capability, probably inherited from the traditional Chinese swordsman movies.