The Tropes in Above the Law (1988)

The more you watch movies, the more you will notice the tropes that come with them. Writers, directors, and producers have their bag of tricks that they frequently like to revisit. That’s why so many movies share different story beats, different shots, and different sound effects. We all know the Wilhelm scream. These little tidbits have become the language of film. They have become part of the language that anyone who watches movies speaks.

As part of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I watch a whole lot of trope-filled flicks. There are a lot of movies that get bad reputations due to how many tropes they utilize. Audiences recognize ideas they’ve seen before in other movies and television shows. If too many of them are used, to the point where the originality of the storytelling gets blurred, audiences will turn against a story. They like the tropes. They feel comfort from the tropes. But they’ll get bored if there are too many tropes.

One movie that relied a little too heavily on tropes was Above the Law, and the tropes were engrained from the foundational level of the story. Nico Toscani (Steven Seagal) was an up-and-coming CIA man in his younger years. When he uncovered a drug ring within the agency, from the top ranks down, he stepped away from the job. He became a police officer, married Sara (Sharon Stone), and had a kid. After settling into his comfortable Chicago life, Nico and his police partner Jacks (Pam Grier) discovered the same drug ring operating in their city. It was up to them to bring it down because the FBI wasn’t going to do it.

Above the Law was an action flick that very much fit into the action movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The story, itself, was a trope with the international drug running going on. I can think of a whole bunch of movies from that time when the story was about a police officer or military personnel taking down a drug running operation originating in another country. In this case, it was opium out of Vietnam. The CIA was using the aftermath of the Vietnam war to bring opium out of Vietnam for profit. Nico wanted to put an end to it.

It's a story that was also part of Aces: Iron Eagle III. In that movie, Chappy and his air stunt show buddies took their planes to Peru because an old friend was killed at the hands of a drug cartel. There was cocaine running from Peru to the US. Chappy was a former military pilot, trying to put the cartel to an end. The main difference between Aces: Iron Eagle III and Above the Law was the location. One of them brought the fight to the US, while the other took the fight to a foreign territory in Peru. It was the same idea, though.

One of the more famous examples of this action story would be the James Bond movie Licence to Kill. It was one of the Timothy Dalton vehicles that was heavily influenced by the action flicks of that era. James Bond went up against a drug lord who had major influence in a fictional Central American nation. It was a former special agent going up against a drug lord on foreign soil. Very much the same basic story as Aces: Iron Eagle III or Above the Law.

Licence to Kill shared one other major trope with Above the Law and many other action movies of that time. How many times have you heard a police officer in a movie be told to “turn in your gun and badge”? Licence to Kill was one of many James Bond movies where the title character was suspended because of his actions, yet decided to go rogue and finish the mission, anyway. Where did he get the money to travel around the world while suspended? I have no idea. That’s not the point. It used the trope.

This post is about Above the Law using the tropes, though. One of the first things that Nico discovered in Chicago was the smuggling of C4. He knew the look and smell of it because of his CIA experience. The guys he caught with the C4 were immediately released and Nico was told not to tail them. It wasn’t his case anymore. It was the FBI’s case. Nico didn’t listen. He tailed the guys, and he continued to do things he was told not to do. This led to his boss asking for his gun and badge. Even then, it didn’t stop Nico from going after the bad guys. He was an action hero in a police movie, of course. He was the trope that many police movies around that time used.

One more example of the turn in your badge trope could be seen in Stone Cold. In this case, the reprimanding happened before the events of the film. The main character had a history of excessive violence when he was pursuing criminals. Now a civilian, while on suspension, he jumped in to stop a grocery store robbery by doing his excessive violence thing again. He had already turned in his badge and gun but was still doing his crime-fighting thing. It would lead to the FBI tapping him in for an undercover mission.

Now that the badge stuff is out of the way, I want to get back to the moment in Above the Law that sparked the main storyline. I want to get to the thing that put the story in motion. There was that little bit of C4 smuggling that really got things going. C4 was a major part of Above the Law. It was essentially the inciting incident. There was a bombing at a church caused by C4. And, most of all, there was supposed to be the bombing and assassination of a senator. The C4 was a major part of the story, a weapon used by the villains to secure the safety of their drug operation.

C4 was something that movies loved to use at that point. It was an explosive that people knew about, so it was an easy way to describe the cause of an explosion without the catch-all of bomb. It made things sound a tad bit more technical. If I’m remembering correctly, Top Dog involved a bunch of C4 in a bomb during the coalition at the end. The Neo-Nazis chose to use C4 to blow up the stage and a bulletproof car so they could kill the people in charge of the coalition. At least, that’s how I remember it. C4 was one of the go-to sources of explosion for action movies at that time. It kind of still is, too.

There were various other tropes throughout Above the Law that were at their hey-day in the 1980s, but are still prominent today. There was backwards driving during a chase scene in a parking garage. That same sort of thing happened during the Pac-Man scene in Pixels. The bad guy tortured Nico and described what he was torturing Nico with while he was doing it. That’s just a standard action movie thing that goes back at least as far as Goldfinger with the laser table. The heroic police officer knowing some form of martial arts was something also seen in Samurai Cop. There was some sort of dive bar that Nico got in a fight in. That type of dive would be popularized in Road House, since the entire movie was about cleaning a dive up.

All these tropes came together to build Above the Law, which felt like a Frankenstein’s monster because of them. It felt like someone took a little bit of this movie and a little bit of that movie and squished them together. What came out was something that felt like everything else at that time. And it almost succeeded, as full of tropes as it was. It almost made for something pretty good. The problem, and what made the tropes so much more noticeable and grating, was Steven Seagal. His acting was an issue, taking you out of the story, and allowing you to more easily notice the flaws within it. It almost worked. If not for him, it probably would have.

Tropes can be a comforting bit of movie watching. As an audience, you sometimes want to see something you recognize. The difficulty for filmmakers is that they sometimes rely too much on tropes. When the entire story is crafted through tropes, it can get tiring. Audiences pick up on things like that. They know the tropes. They like some of them and they like when they’re used sparingly. Unless a movie is some sort of parody or spoof, playing upon the tropes to poke fun at them, filmmakers should stay away from making them trope after trope after trope. There’s no originality in that, and no enjoyment.

Here are a few notes to close things out:

• I mentioned a bunch of movies during this post. They were Aces: Iron Eagle III (week 90), Stone Cold (week 423), Top Dog (week 126), Pixels (week 407), Samurai Cop (week 66), and Road House (week 200).
• Thalmus Rasulala made a third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Above the Law. He was previously in Blacula (week 82) and Mom and Dad Save the World (week 186).
• A recognizable face in Above the Law was Sharon Stone, who was also in Catwoman (week 174) and Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (week 400).
• Pam Grier was also in Above the Law. She already popped up in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (week 224) and The Adventures of Pluto Nash (week 446).
• Michael Rooker had a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance in Above the Law. He would also make appearances in The Marine 2 (week 30) and Jumper (week 452).
• Finishing off the third appearances in Above the Law was Gene Hartline, who was in Stone Cold (week 423) and Maximum Overdrive (week 479).
• The star of Above the Law was Steven Seagal, who was the star of Exit Wounds (week 93).
• Gregory Allen Williams was in God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness (week 319) and Above the Law.
• Dennis Phun returned from Surf Nazis Must Die (week 484) for Above the Law.
• Finally, John C. Reilly had a small role in Above the Law, well before he would appear in Holmes and Watson (week 486).
• Have you seen Above the Law? What did you think? Did you recognize the tropes in it? What ones did I miss? What other movies can you think of that featured these tropes? Answer any of these questions in the comments, or leave any of your other thoughts.
• If there’s a movie that you think would make a good fit in Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. I’m open to suggestions. In fact, I appreciate them. They help me discover movies I might not have otherwise known.
• Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram. Check it out.
• Now it’s time to look towards next week, when I’ll be checking out a movie I don’t know. I know it enough to schedule it, but I don’t know how I know it even that well. I don’t remember scheduling it. I don’t remember how I found out about it. Anyway, I’ll be checking out She’s Out of Control. It’s Tony Danza time! I’ll see you next week for that.