Murphy's Law (1986)

Film: Murphy's Law (1986)

Stars: Charles Bronson, Carrie Sondgress, Kathleen Wilhoite, Robert F. Lyons

Director: J. Lee Thompson

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Charles Bronson: click here to learn more about Mr. Bronson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After Death Wish, Charles Bronson would spend the remainder of his career making, for lack of a better word, schlock, most of these movies for Cannon Films, a production company that produced our picture today Murphy's Law.  Cannon would make some notable films, including Runaway Train with Jon Voight & Eric Roberts, as well as Street Smart which featured a breakout role for Morgan Freeman (all three of these actors would get Oscar nominations for their parts), but it was best known for producing lucrative action flicks that would play really well in the emerging home video market.  In many ways it was a predecessor to the direct-to-video trend of the 1990's (and the later phenomenon of RedBox movies featuring fading action stars like Mel Gibson & Bruce Willis), and the two actors they were most well-known for working with were Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson.  Outside The Indian Runner with Dennis Hopper & Patricia Arquette, after 1980 Bronson would work pretty much exclusively on the 1980's equivalent of Poverty Row movies, making a fortune in the process, but largely eschewing any sort of acting legacy as none of these films post-Death Wish have really lasted in the public's memory.

(Spoilers Ahead) This doesn't mean that all of these films were bad, exactly, but they were formulaic and they were decidedly not Sergio Leone or John Sturges.  Murphy's Law is about a man who essentially feels like he's on autopilot (or maybe that's just Bronson's blasé performance).  Jack Murphy (Bronson) is a cop who spends the film's opening scenes arresting Arabella McGee (Wilhoite), a young carjacker with a foul mouth.  We see intercuts of a mysterious woman we later learn to be Joan Freeman (Snodgress), who is bent on revenge against Jack for imprisoning her years earlier, and frames him for murder, which means that he and Arabella must go on the run as he tries to solve the case.  The film involves a series of dead bodies stacking up, along with some nudity, drugs, and (because this is a 1980's action film with a female lead under the age of thirty) sexual assault, and a variety of character actors getting killed, including Bill Henderson, who you may recognize as the Cop in the movie Clue (or at least that's how I recognized him, though perhaps more learned people will know he was an accomplished jazz musician).  The movie ends with Arabella & Jack injured but clearly friends (and maybe more), while Joan is flattened on a pavement after a fall.

The movie almost works on a camp level, even if it's not remotely any actual good.  Wilhoite, whom you might know from either her years of voicing the title character in the cartoon Pepperann or from playing Luke's sister on Gilmore Girls, has some of the most ridiculous dialogue I've ever heard in a film.  She is asked to insult someone every 15 seconds, frequently with profane or even offensive (this movie is CRAZY homophobic, though notably there is in fact an actual surprise gay couple to at least make one of the insults feel accurate if still offensive), in a schtick that would basically suffocate your kidneys if you turned it into a drinking game.  We learn virtually nothing about Snodgress other than (as she goes) she's clearly mentally insane, but she tries her best to instill a sense of fun into these proceedings, but all-in-all, this film fulfills its purpose: it's fast-paced, feeding your baser instincts, and disposable.  That it isn't particularly good doesn't feel like Cannon (or Bronson's) concern since they already got your money.

This is where I put in that it's disappointing what Bronson would do with his later career, because he would never get a post-fame reassessment like some of his peers (I'm thinking specifically of Clint Eastwood & Burt Reynolds, both of whom would eventually become Oscar-nominated actors) would in the years that followed.  This wasn't for a lack of trying.  Bronson turned down the role of The Shootist (John Wayne's final role, and one of his best) because the main character was dying of prostate cancer, and Bronson didn't want to play that onscreen.  Ingmar Bergman was fascinated by Bronson, and tried to work with him, but Bronson didn't like Bergman's films & wasn't interested.  He tried out for a number of major movies of the era, including Capricorn One, Escape from New York, and bizarrely the lead in Superman, but wasn't "right for the part" and it went nowhere.

The most famous role, and one that would've changed his legacy that Bronson would turn down was of Curly in City Slickers.  Initially the role went to Jack Palance, but Palance had a scheduling conflict, and so they brought in Bronson for the part.  But at the time, Bronson's beloved wife Jill Ireland was dying of breast cancer, and Bronson wouldn't allow himself to work while she was suffering.  Bronson turned down the role, the City Slickers producers found a way to get Palance into the schedule...and Palance would go on to win an Academy Award for the role.  Bronson would never have a role of that caliber offered to him again, and would work irregularly until a hip surgery eventually made it impossible.  Toward the end of his life, before his death from lung cancer in 2003 at the age of 81, Bronson would walk with a cane, one that contained the ashes of Jill Ireland, whom he couldn't bear to be apart from, even in death.  The cane would be buried with him.

Next month, we're going to talk about a contemporary of Bronson's, and a frequent costar (they would make three films together), but one whose legacy post-fame was decidedly more critical-friendly...though his life would be considerably shorter than Bronson's which would have an even bigger impact on that legacy.