RIP Carl Weathers

During the February doldrums of 1988, the Lorimar production company dumped a movie called “Action Jackson” into theaters. It was just under a year after the release of “Lethal Weapon,” seven months after “Predator” and five months before “Die Hard.”

Like those epochal hits, “Action Jackson” was produced by Joel Silver, and featured many of the face-famous character actors that Silver tended to use in his Reagan-era shoot-'em-ups: Robert Davi, Bill Duke, Mary Ellen Trainor, Al Leong.

But the movie’s headliner was Carl Weathers — for once not a sideman, but the star.

Weathers, who died Thursday at 76, was briefly an Oakland Raider before becoming a fan-favorite actor, beloved as a foil to Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Adam Sandler and, decades later, Pedro Pascal.

But “Action Jackson,” a deeply weird but highly watchable attempt to launch Weathers as an action star in his own right, is a persuasive argument that the onetime Apollo Creed’s big-screen legacy — always the best man, never the groom — should have been greater.

It is the only movie that could be described as a Carl Weathers vehicle, or at the least the only one that got a proper late-’80s promotional rollout, with Weathers hosting “Saturday Night Live” and joshing with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.”

And yet he still didn’t get his due: The title “Action Jackson” flashes on screen in bold red all-caps before Weathers’s name does…..

“Action Jackson” was one of those indefatigable ’80s supercop movies, and probably the only one where someone actually says the word “indefatigable.”

Weathers’s Jericho “Action” Jackson is a former track star turned Detroit police officer who has a law degree from Harvard, although he hasn’t used it to challenge his department’s policy that “Jackson is so vicious we don’t even let him carry a gun,” as one uniformed flatfoot mentions in the tropey part of the movie in which a minor character makes sure we know what a world-beating titan our hero is before he makes his entrance. (Of course, Jackson uses his J.D. and his fast feet later in the film, citing case law and outrunning a taxicab.)

The plot has something to do with an evil automaker/martial arts expert played by Craig T. Nelson, who is having union officials murdered in needlessly elaborate ways. The plot is also very much not the point.

The purpose, rather, is to showcase Weathers’s all-rounder versatility, marshaling the charm and athleticism for which he was known already and the comedic gifts for which he’d be cherished later.

Weathers’s third act was as a primarily comedic actor, in the 1996 Adam Sandler vehicle “Happy Gilmore,” as the hard-times version of himself in “Arrested Development,” and as an interplanetary bail bondsman-turned-magistrate in “The Mandalorian.”……


https://www.washingtonpost.com/ente.../carl-weathers-rocky-predator-action-jackson/