Posted on March 9th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro
Is there a film character with a sillier motivation than Carl Weathers in FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE?
In that film, serious-minded but inferior belated sequel to one of the greatest men-on-a-mission movies ever made, Edward Fox and Robert Shaw play the surviving protagonists of the original, now sent behind enemy lines to blow up an inconvenient bridge. (It being a small war, they will end up running into Harrison Ford and his own band of saboteurs, who have their own mission in the same neighborhood, and they wind up joining forces, which is both convenient and hilarious; you kinda wonder whether, if their parachutes had come down a mile away, they would have run into and teamed up with the Dirty Dozen or Inglourious Basterds instead. These teams were thick on the ground, apparently.)
But before they even board their plane to get to where the mission is, they run into Carl Weathers, an angry black soldier being trucked to the stockade for some unspecified infraction.
Weathers beats the shit out of his escorts and hops the plane with the suicide mission, not caring where it’s headed as long as it’s someplace where he won’t have to drink all his beverages from a tin cup.
They’re not happy with his intrusion, but make the best of it.
His crime and sentence remain unspecified throughout, but it is much more entertaining to imagine that he thought he was pulling off a fast one by evading his thirty day imprisonment for insubordination, than thinking he was headed for life imprisonment at hard labor. I consider it absolutely hilarious that he hops their plane and joins a suicide mission and thinks he has pulled a fast one.
Personally, I kinda think top-secret commando missions behind enemy lines don’t let random assholes just shout “Shotgun!” and hop in.
Need I say that I discern something a little racist about his character, and not just because Richard Kiel goes full-throttle bigot on him? He’s a jackass who never does seem to comprehend that he’s made an awful decision. At least he’s still alive at the end of the film, defying the “Black Guy Dies First” rule; that’s something. However, I kind of doubt the premise of him receiving a break on his sentence, when he returns to base, later on.
Kinda like B.D in Doonesbury signing up for Vietnam to get out of studying for finals.
Tags: Assholes, Bad Movies, Carl Weathers, Force 10 From Navarone, Harrison Ford, Inglourious Basterds, Movies, Race, Robert Shaw, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns Of Navarone | Category Humor, Movies
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