Extreme Prejudice is a 1987 American neo-Western action thriller film directed by Walter Hill, from a screenplay by Harry Kleiner and Deric Washburn, from a story by John Milius and Fred Rexer. It stars Nick Nolte and Powers Boothe, with a supporting cast including Michael Ironside, María Conchita Alonso, Rip Torn, William Forsythe, and Clancy Brown.
Set in South Texas near the U.S.-Mexico border, the film's plot centers on the conflict between two former friends-turned-rivals, one a Texas Ranger (Nolte) and one a drug trafficker (Boothe), who both become embroiled in a political conspiracy involving a black ops military unit. The film was released by Tri-Star Pictures on April 24, 1987. It received a positive critical response, but was not a financial success.
Extreme Prejudice is an homage, of sorts, to The Wild Bunch, a western directed by Sam Peckinpah, with whom Hill worked on The Getaway. Both films end with a massive gunfight in a Mexican border town. The title originates from "terminate with extreme prejudice", a phrase popularized by Apocalypse Now, also written by Milius.
Plot At the airport in El Paso, Texas, five U.S. Army sergeants meet up with Major Paul Hackett, the leader of the clandestine Zombie Unit, composed of soldiers reported to be killed in action and on temporary assignment under Hackett for the duration of a secret mission.
Jack Benteen is a tough Texas Ranger. His best friend from high school is Cash Bailey, a former police leaker who has crossed into Mexico and become a major cocaine trafficker. Bailey tries to bribe Benteen to look the other way while sending major flake shipments to the U.S. When Benteen refuses, he is left with a warning by Bailey: Look the other way, or die trying.
Benteen and his friend, Sheriff Hank Pearson, are ambushed by Bailey's men at a gas station outside of town, and Pearson is killed in the shootout; Benteen realizes Bailey set them up. Two of Bailey's men escape the shootout and try to steal Hackett's vehicle but are killed.
The Zombie Unit arrives in town tracking Bailey. When they attempt to rob a local bank, the getaway is inadvertently foiled; one member, Luther Fry, is killed and two others - Buck Atwater and Declan Patrick Coker - are caught and detained by Benteen in the process. Benteen discovers the men are listed as dead in all official records, and their ammunition is the kind issued to members of the Army Special Forces.
Benteen is confronted at his home by Major Hackett, who tells him they were robbing the bank in order to get Bailey's money and a safety deposit box containing accounts on all the drug money deposited in his name. Bailey was a previous government informant under Hackett's management, who turned rogue, and Hackett is leading an off-the-books mission to eliminate him and the documents linking him to the U.S. Government.
Now understanding the full story, Benteen teams up with the soldiers and crosses the border into Mexico to track down Bailey and end his snow running operation. At Bailey's hacienda, they are joined by Benteen's girlfriend Sarita Cisneros, who was once Bailey's woman and has followed Benteen into Mexico.
At an Independence Day festival, Benteen confronts Bailey while the soldiers prepare to attack Bailey's private army - telling them to "[terminate] with extreme prejudice," including Benteen. Hackett is caught murdering Bailey's accountant by his right-hand man Larry McRose. It is revealed that there never was a sanctioned mission - Hackett was actually Bailey's former partner who Bailey stopped cutting in, and now he is trying to get his money while covering up his own involvement in the drug trade. The orders to the "Zombie Unit" were all forged by Hackett, who intends for them to die at the mission's conclusion.
Atwater warns Benteen about Hackett's orders to be shot on sight and tells Benteen to go for himself. The town erupts into a massive gunfight, with the surviving Zombie Unit fending off both Hackett and Bailey's men, as Benteen and Sarita escape in a Jeep. McRose guns down Hackett and is killed instantly, along with the rest of the Unit, among them are Charles Biddle, Monday and Chub Luke, a coke smuggler and the brother of T.C. Luke, who was killed by Benteen in a tavern several days earlier.
Afterwards, Benteen and Bailey confront each other again in a duel. Benteen pleads with Bailey to surrender, but Bailey refuses, fires at Benteen, and Benteen returns fire, killing Bailey. Benteen strikes a deal with Bailey's right-hand man, Lupo, allowing him to take over the local dope business in exchange for being allowed to leave Mexico unharmed with Sarita; Lupo advises Benteen to return the favor for him someday, as the two walk off to an uncertain future.
Cast Credits from the AFI Catalog of Feature Films:
Production
Development
Under John Milius The film was first announced for production in 1976, with John Milius to direct from a script he co-wrote with Fred Rexer. "It's very complicated", said Milius. "I've never been able to put what the movie's about in a few words. All I can say is it's a modern-day story about subversion and espionage."
He elaborated in a 1976 interview saying it was "about Special Forces. It's a rightwing political thriller, a rightwing Costa-Gavras film. It takes place in Texas and involves the Texas Rangers as well. I shouldn't talk about it." However he did describe one scene:
There's an operation carried out with peak efficiency where four highly trained specialists wipe out forty men. They don't wipe them out in the usual sense, because they're so good and heroic. I wanted to give the sense that these four are more than a match for forty because they're so skilled at what they do: use of explosives, automatic weapons fire, interlocking fields of fire. Their planning is so precise and perfect: they're used to thinking this way. When you come away from this battle, you're not just impressed with their skill, but also with how cold they are. Ruthlessly efficient.
He also said there was a line in the film "where a Ranger is talking about being in a gunfight with people in a car and the other guy says, 'That gun won't stop a car', and the Ranger says, 'It will if you shoot it in the driver.' That's a Milius line. I'm trying to get away from that; the rest of the script is very flat. I'm trying to write more mundane now. Rather than dazzle constantly, I'm trying to let the weight of the story carry it, and the more subtle implications of it, letting scenes play themselves out the way they would in reality. We'll see what happens. It's a definite development."
In an interview for the July 1978 issue of Crawdaddy magazine, Milius spoke about the film as a future project, giving away the original ending. "A group of drug dealers take over a town in Texas, then finally one person, a Vietnam veteran, stands up to them and wipes them out. Then we cut to a meeting room at the Pentagon, where we find out it was all a top secret experiment to find out how far Americans can be pushed before they fight back."
The film was to be made in October 1976 in Texas, but Milius instead decided to make Big Wednesday. Rexer later worked as the military advisor on Apocalypse Now (written by Milius) and Red Dawn (written-directed by Milius).
Under Walter Hill In 1982 the project was in the hands of Walter Hill. He assigned Larry Gross to do some work on the script before the latter did work on 48 Hrs.
In 1983 it was reported that Carolco Pictures, then flush with money from the success of First Blood, had purchased the script from Warner Bros and were hoping for Ted Kotcheff to direct. Milius was reportedly rewriting the script to bring it up to date.
In 1985 Jonathan Demme was linked to the project. Then Carolco signed Walter Hill to direct and he hired Harry Kleiner to rewrite the film. Hill had known Kleiner from the film Bullitt, on which Hill was an assistant director and Kleiner the writer; Hill was impressed by Kleiner's talent for writing and rewriting on the set daily, which he needed for this film.
Lukas Heller, who had co-written Blue City (1986) with Hill, did uncredited revisions on the script.
Casting The lead role was played by Nick Nolte with whom Hill had made 48 Hrs. Hill:
I wanted someone who was representative of the tradition of the American West—taciturn, stoical, enduring. Someone who carried a lot of pain with him. I told Nick, "The kind of thing I'm talking about is Cooperesque." I had him look at a lot of Gary Cooper films."Nick Nolte Far From Down, Out" by Glenn Lovell, Orlando Sentinel April 29, 1987 accessed February 6, 2015
Nick Nolte said the role made a change of pace for him:
It was a chance to play a morally perfect character. Like Walter said, we spent a lot of time looking at old films to get this Old West flavor. We looked at Wayne films, at Cooper films, at Randolph Scott films. Yeah, there's a lot of High Noon in this movie. There's a lot of Howard Hawks director of Red River. There's a lot of Sam Peckinpah ... I needed to find the demeanor of how those '40s characters carried themselves—how they dressed and carried their guns.
Nolte got writer friend Peter Gent, who had written North Dallas Forty, to recommend a real-life Texas Ranger to act as a model for his character. Gent suggested veteran Ranger Joaquin Jackson. Jackson later said he:
More or less edited the script with Nick. We got more into the type of language Rangers use, as well as the Rangers' relationship with other law enforcement agencies—the federal narcotics people, FBI, etc. What I'm trying to get back to the press is that it all relates back to narcotics.
Nolte spent three weeks in Texas with Jackson learning the day-to-day activities of a Ranger. Nolte took what he learned and incorporated it into his character's mannerisms and dress.
Nolte concurred:
This film is kind of about the drug wars. Walter and I wanted to do a story about the distribution of drugs, not in the city, but across the border. There's two points of view about this drug situation in America. One is educational, and the other has to do with the prevalence of drugs, the availability of them. Being a child out of the '60s, I was very much involved in drugs. If you wanted to be part of the subculture in the '60s, you had to seek out your drugs. It's different today. Kids don't have a chance. They're confronted by drugs on every block ... It sounds hypocritical, I know, but there's not so much hypocrisy being a child of the '60s and having to make this kind of change because we come from a generation that accepts change.
The role of Nolte's antagonist was played by another actor who had worked with Hill before, Powers Boothe. Boothe:
Every movie Walter's ever made is a western—it's just that people don't know it. Thematically, men standing up for themselves and making their way in the world is a theme that's been in movies throughout the world. But it's particularly an American genre, and it has to do, in my mind, with the development of our nation: you can do anything you're strong enough to do; right is right, and wrong is wrong. And at least in the movies, right wins out."Mr. Beaks Takes A Trip Back To TOMBSTONE With Curly Bill Brocius Himself, Powers Boothe!". Aint It Cool News, April 27, 2010. Accessed February 6, 2014.
Shooting Walter Hill had worked with Sam Peckinpah in the early 1970s on The Getaway and said he "tipped my hat to Sam a couple of times" in the film. The film contains several direct references to Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, most notably a climactic shootout in Mexican border town.
Principal photography took place in El Paso, Texas and in Santa Clarita, California (doubling for northern Mexico). Initial plans to shoot on-location in Mexico were abandoned due to financial considerations. Studio interiors were filmed at Culver Studios.
Michael Ironside said a highlight of the film was meeting composer Ry Cooder.