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Released by: MGM
Released on: July 17, 2012.
Director: Steve Carver
Cast: Chuck Norris, David Carradine, Barbara Carrera, Leon Isaac Kennedy, L.Q. Jones
Year: 1983
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The Movie:
In director Steve Carver's masterpiece of eighties action movie awesomeness, Chuck Norris plays J.J. McQuade, a Texas Ranger who does things his own way on his own terms. He's a lone wolf, you see, and doesn't need distractions from things like fighting crime and shirtless target practice. When we meet him he busts up a gang of bad guys and blows up a car but things are about to get a whole lot more complicated for McQuade when a man named Rawley Wilkes (David Carradine) comes to town.
A skilled martial artist, Rawley has also got a secret gig going on as an illegal arms dealer. When McQuade's daughter, Sally (Dana Kimmell), gets caught in the crossfire between Rawley's men and a rival faction during a shipment gone bad, he decides it's high time that he took the bull by the horns and put a stop to Rawley and his operation. He's going to have to go this alone… cause he's a lone wolf… except that he sort of gets some help from a foxy chick named Lola Richardson (Barbara Carrera) who he rolls around and makes out with in the mud. When Lola and Sally wind up the victims of a kidnapping and are whisked off to Mexico, McQuade and an FBI agent (Leon Isaac Kennedy) head south to take care of business, at which point you just know Norris and Carradine are going to throw down…
Kind of like a really long and extra goofy episode of Walker: Texas Ranger, the film moves along at a pretty good pace but really only exists to remind us time and time again who tough Norris' character is. He kicks people, he punches them, he rolls around in the dirt without a shirt on and shoots things and he sort of mud wrestles with his love interest (who really gives that water shooting hose a suggestive work out!) only to later get on her case for cleaning up his place and throwing out his beer. He's just about the manliest man to ever walk the planet in this movie, from the way he refers to F.B.I. agents as 'candy assed feds' to the way he solves many of life's problems by kicking people in the face.
The rest of the cast are there to either appease Norris or to be beaten up by Norris. It's cool to see Leon Isaac Kennedy here, best known for either his sex tape or his three Penitentiary movies, and David Carradine makes for a good bad guy and provides Chuck with a decent sparring partner for the big finish. The film is rated PG but it's strong for that rating. There's some mild language and no shortage of violence while Carrera's character has some sort of obvious disdain for support wear and spends most of the movie without a bra, hiding just barely her hooters under some clingy and thin shirts. Is the movie good? No, not really, but it is fun. If you like Chuck, you'll know what to expect from this one. He and Carver aren't trying to reinvent the wheel with this movie but it offers up all the action, and all the clichés and unintentional humor, you'd want from an eighties era Norris film. And for that reason, it's worth seeing.
Video/Audio/Extras:
MGM presents Lone Wolf McQuade on Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 1.85.1 that looks very good. Detail is noticeably improved over the DVD release from a few years ago (which was full frame) and color reproduction feels more natural here. The film is grainy as it should be but doesn't suffer from any serious print damage. Black levels are pretty good and skin tones look nice and natural, there's no evidence of any noise reduction having been applied here. This isn't going to melt your eyes the way the latest and greatest mainstream blockbuster might but it is, overall, a very nice high definition presentation that brings out a lot more appreciable detail, texture and color than we've seen for this movie on home video in the past. If you've seen and appreciate the recent MGM Blu-ray releases of other eighties era Chuck Norris films you'll like what you see here. It's not gloriously restored but it looks nice and film-like.
The English DTS-HD Mono track on this disc is also fine. The film's score sounds good, the dialogue is easy to understand the levels are properly balanced. There are no issues with hiss or distortion and everything comes through cleanly and clearly. As this is an older mono mix you obviously can't really expect much in the way of channel separation or fancy surround action but for what it is, this older single channel tracks sounds just fine. A French language DTS-HD Mono track is included as are removable subtitles provided in English SDH, French and Spanish.
Extras? Nothing except for a pop-up menu that offers chapter selection and subtitle set up - and the film's original trailer, that's it.
The Final Word:
MGM's Blu-ray release of Lone Wolf McQuade might not be the super deluxe special edition some of us may have wanted but it looks and sounds very good and it offers up the movie in the best shape we've yet to see on home video. The film itself holds up well, a great action movie with a fun cast and a cool plot, the right mix of goofy eighties action clichés and ridiculous entertainment.
