Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 9 April

Blind Fury (Noyce, 1989)

I told myself that I wanted to rewatch Blind Fury after 35 years because we have been watch­ing the new series of Daredevil: Born Again and I was curi­ous how Rutger Hauer’s ver­sion of a visu­ally impaired fight­er for justice com­pared with Charlie Cox, but truth-be-told it was just nostalgia.

A couple of times while we were watch­ing it last night, the editor-in chief asked me, “Why are we watch­ing this? Do you have to write about it?” and my only reply was, “I don’t have to, but I want to …” I’m get­ting a bit tired of stream­ing ser­vices only hav­ing titles from this cen­tury and one of the mis­sions here at F&S is to encour­age view­ers to dig a little deep­er but, if I’m hon­est, Blind Fury isn’t the most com­pel­ling argu­ment I could make.

A mid-budget con­tender for the high concept action com­edy that was so pop­u­lar in the 80s – Lethal Weapon 2, Batman, Turner & Hooch and Tango & Cash were all in the box office top twenty that year1 – it hasn’t aged too well and the uncer­tain tone sug­gests a lack of con­fid­ence in both the cent­ral idea and the cent­ral casting.

Inspired by the long-running series of Japanese mar­tial arts films, Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman (and accord­ing to the cred­its, a remake of the 17^th film in that series, Zatoichi Challenged from 1967), you can tell that there are hopes that Blind Fury would spawn what we now call a fran­chise. It wasn’t to be.

Rutger Hauer was a well-known face in this peri­od thanks to Blade Runner and The Hitcher but hadn’t taken off as a lead­ing man. He plays Nick, a Vietnam vet who has been miss­ing in action for over twenty years. Blinded in a fire­fight, he is taken in by loc­al vil­la­gers and trained to be a mas­ter swords­man – expos­i­tion is effi­ciently handled dur­ing the open­ing credits.

He returns to the US with a score to settle but stumbles upon a drug con­spir­acy organ­ised by some dodgy2 Reno casino oper­at­ors (includ­ing famil­i­ar face Noble Willingham). They have kid­napped his old army buddy (Terrance O’Quinn from The Stepfather) who is cook­ing up the blue crys­tals because, if he doesn’t, the crooks will kill his son, Billy (Brandon Call). Killing – or even cap­tur­ing Billy is prov­ing to be a chal­lenge, though, because Nick is now his blade-wielding guard­i­an angel.

Australian dir­ect­or Philip Noyce had just come off the hit thrill­er Dead Calm, but there’s an uncer­tainty about the com­edy here that he can’t over­come. Hauer is just too edgy an act­or to warm to as a hero, although he’s con­vin­cingly blind in many sequences. Still, there’s a lot of refer­ring to eyes and sight here – glasses being stomped on, Billy’s moth­er (Meg Foster) hav­ing the most pen­et­rat­ing blue eyes – which sug­gests that there was some dir­ect­ori­al ambi­tion at work.

Whoever is dis­trib­ut­ing the cur­rent iter­a­tion of Blind Fury also lacks a bit of faith in it as there’s a ninja on the poster who does not appear in the film at all!

Where to watch Blind Fury

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, USA, UK: Digital rental