Kick the Dog: When a character does something evil for no apparent gain, because the author wants to demonstrate that he’s not a nice guy and shift audience sympathy away from him.
—TVtropes
Richard Lynch, who plays the cartoonishly cruel villain in Invasion U.S.A., does an awful lot of dog-kicking. In the opening scene, he poses as a U.S. Coast Guard who rescues a dozen Cuban refugees, helplessly adrift at sea, before gunning them all down. (It’s later revealed he even gunned down the men who helped him gun down the refugees.) In another scene, he throws a badly injured woman out the upper-floor window of a building after shooting Billy Drago’s pecker off. For his next act, he blows up a suburban neighborhood with a rocket launcher while apparently using an infinite ammo cheat.
Lynch’s plan involves flooding the United States with hundreds of terrorists who will then pose as policemen and civilians in between random acts of unkindness, mainly bombings and mass shootings. No reasons, no motives. Just pure terrorism.
Chuck Norris is our reluctant hero, this time playing a retired CIA agent living in the Everglades. He’s asked to come back for one last mission, but refuses on the grounds he’s perfectly happy doing… whatever it is he’s doing. As far as I can tell, his life mostly involves driving around in an airboat, trapping gators, and watching an armadillo drink milk from a dog bowl. What’s great about director Joseph Zito is he’s smart enough to limit these necessary but boring scenes; it won’t be long until Lynch’s men show up to kill Chuck’s only friend and blow up his house.
Back then, we all knew exactly what we were getting from the latest Chuck Norris film. Few of them ever promised anything deeper. They did so well because they appeased moviegoers’ desire to see something stupidly entertaining, the operative word being “entertaining.” There’s something pure about Invasion U.S.A., which has amazing stunts and action sequences, even if the logic leading up to them is inexplicable.
Consider the shootout in a mall. Two bad guys come crashing out of a plate-glass window in a pickup truck. You’d think after hearing all the gunfire and explosions inside, most pedestrians would’ve scattered long ago. Yet a woman walking along the sidewalk stops to scream at the henchmen for nearly running her over. The passenger takes a handful of her hair and the men drive off with her hanging from the side of the truck. Meanwhile Chuck Norris pursues in a commandeered convertible.
The logical thing for the bad guys to do? Simply toss the woman onto the street in front of Norris’s car, forcing him to screech to a halt. Instead, the bad guys drive a couple of miles with the woman screaming the entire way. You get the feeling that screenwriters Chuck and his brother, Aaron Norris, were sitting around a typewriter (or maybe Crayons and paper), saying things like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”
And it is cool. Just because Chuck Norris has the emotional complexity of a turd, it doesn’t mean his absurdly violent fantasies aren’t valid forms of art. Invasion U.S.A. is probably my favorite Chuck Norris film. The director also made my favorite Friday The 13th film: The Final Chapter. Those two films won’t seem like anything special to the casual viewer, but to those of us who indulge in fine cheese, he’s a master.
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