Plot
Detective Jack Williams, who lost his left arm in the Tet Offensive, is shot dead in his apartment. His estranged friend, detective Mike Hammer (whose life Jack saved while losing his arm) is warned by police detective Pat Chambers to stay out of it but he nevertheless investigates the matter on his own. He speaks with Jack's widow Myrna, who says that they were attending a sex therapy clinic operated by the glamorous Dr. Charlotte Bennett. Hammer visits the clinic and finds a Government Issue bugging device in the doctor's office.
Hammer's secretary Velda identifies Jack's receipts for gasoline near Bear Mountain close to a summer camp run by Hammer's old friend Joe Butler. Mike and Velda visit Joe, who tells them of a military project in Saigon involving the use of drugs to turn prisoners of war into friendly spies and how Captain Romero developed a technique for mind control. Two cars of CIA agents pursue the three on a car chase that ends when Hammer throws a Molotov cocktail at one car, causing it to drive off a cliff into the water, and blocks the road with his vehicle then shoots the second car, causing it to explode.
The FBI trace the gun that killed Jack to special effects artist Harry Lundee, who had reported the gun stolen. Hammer visits him on set, where Lundee is shot in the back by a projectile knife fired by an unknown assassin and, in his dying breath, confesses that he laundered the gun to mobster Charlie Kalecki, but Kalecki is reluctant to speak with Hammer about any ties to Romero.
The CIA, wishing to distance itself from Romero's experiments, plants a series of clues in an attempt to lead Mike Hammer to Romero in order to have Hammer eliminate Romero for them. Chambers is instructed by the CIA to plant a photo of Romero in Jack's apartment as bait for Hammer and Romero gives Dr. Bennett a fake file about Jack's activities, which Hammer is upset to read during a visit to the Northridge Clinic. Hammer questions the sexual surrogate twins who worked with Jack, before observing Dr Bennett and her sex therapy team at work. While watching this session, Hammer hears the twins being attacked but is too late to prevent their deaths at the hands of a psychotic killer. In the wake of these extreme events, Hammer checks in on Dr Bennett at her practice and the two become lovers.
The twins' killer, Charles Kendricks, has been brainwashed by Romero, who sends him to abduct Velda. Romero's black ops squad capture Hammer, torture him and cover the badly-beaten Hammer with cheap liquor, intending to push him to his death in traffic. Hammer turns the tables on his captors, fights his way free and escapes. He races to Kendricks' apartment and stops him from killing Velda, then pursues Kendricks through the Manhattan streets and shoots him dead. Convinced that Kendricks was a puppet, Hammer confronts Detective Chambers. Chambers, again being secretly instructed by the CIA, tells Hammer that Kalecki supplied the gun that killed Jack and owned the apartment building where Kendricks lived.
Hammer captures Kalecki and forces him to drive back to the Northridge Clinic, where Romero has now set up a sequence of fortifications and death-traps. Hammer jumps out of the car before Romero sets off a mine, instantly killing Kalecki. Hammer kills all of Romero's goons commando-style then climbs over a wall and into the main building to confront Romero. After a brutal fight, Romero wrestles Hammer's gun from him but Hammer has plugged the barrel, so when Romero fires the gun it explodes in his face. Romero dies before Hammer can get the answers he wants about Jack's death. Searching Romero's office, Hammer finds Romero's black ops computer files.
Later, Hammer visits Dr Bennett at her home, bearing an expensively wrapped gift that turns out to be Jack's prosthetic arm. Hammer confronts her with the information he's uncovered: she was the intruder who murdered Jack Williams. Charlotte attempts to seduce Hammer and kill him with a hidden gun but he beats her to it while they embrace, shooting her in cold blood. With her dying breath, Dr. Bennett asks Hammer "How could you?" Using the famous closing line from Spillane's original novel, Hammer responds "It was easy."
Classification and censorship
For its US theatrical release in 1982, the MPAA requested minor cuts to a throat-slashing scene in order to qualify for an R rating. [7]
In advance of its UK theatrical release that same year, on March 3, 1982, the BBFC classified the film as an X (its then-regular over-18 cinema category) after requiring some cuts that toned down the juxtaposition of sex and violence.
When the BBFC re-classified the film for UK home video release on November 11, 1986, using their new 18 category, a total of four minutes of cuts were required to achieve this rating (at that point in British history, the BBFC was very concerned about sexually violent and exploitative material being available at home via VHS cassette). Included in these video cuts were an extended conversation between Hammer and the sexual surrogate twins, orgy scenes at Dr. Bennett's clinic that intercut orgasm with the violent torture of the twins by Kendricks (a psychopathic killer with a cut-throat razor), cuts to a scene where a woman has her throat slit in a Chinese restaurant and the complete removal of Hammer's high-speed cab ride through Manhattan, which had been closely intercut with the sadistic knife torture of Velda by Kendricks. [8] [9]
Critical reaction
The film initially received mixed reviews - some reviewers felt that certain plot lines from the novel had been toned down in favor of nudity, violence and extended action scenes - and observed that Cohen's script contained 1980s-era sub-plots not present in the novel, such as government conspiracies, torture and mind-control techniques (deployed by both the CIA and the Mafia). [4] Others felt that Cohen's CIA/Mafia back-story added a welcome sardonic quality in keeping with the spirit of Spillane and that graphic scenes of sex and gunplay were key to faithfully adapting the fevered narrative of the novel. [4] [10]
The New York Times' Jennifer Dunning enjoyed Assante's casting and found the pulp film highly entertaining:
Along the way there are spectacular chases and ingenious gore, including a water bed that oozes blood. It all ends with Hammer storming a booby-trapped hideaway, alone and without a gun, then slithering through a last little fillip of bloody romance. I, the Jury only aims to entertain. And who cares, with Mr. Assante around? [11]
Roger Ebert praised the movie, Assante and Barbara Carrera - and was particularly impressed with Laurene Landon's performance as Velda:
"I, the Jury" has a few touches all its own, however, and one of them is named Velda. She's Mike Hammer's private secretary, and she is played by Laurene Landon, the tall blonde who was one of the wrestlers in Robert Aldrich's "All the Marbles." She is absolutely, breathtakingly, beautiful. And she has a light comic manner, a way about her, that's really fetching. She's in love with Hammer, but he doesn't give her the time of day. Still, she stays in good cheer, and so do we. [12]
In the decades since its release, Cohen and Heffron's movie has come to be celebrated by the vast majority of Spillane fans, including Spillane's biographer/co-author Max Allan Collins, as an underrated pulp fiction/grindhouse classic, the most faithful screen adaptation of the tone and spirit of Spillane's fevered prose and one of two great Mike Hammer movie adaptations, the other being Robert Aldrich's widely-lauded, apocalyptic 1955 Spillane deconstruction Kiss Me Deadly starring Ralph Meeker. [13]
Writing in his 2012 book, "Mickey Spillane on Screen" (co-authored with James L. Traylor), Collins stated:
Assante's performance has a psychotic edge that makes his Hammer, updated or not, the definitive screen portrayal to date of the young Mike Hammer. Somewhere in there with the Brando and Stallone bits is a sense of the Mick himself: Assante has watched Spillane, obviously, and has the bantam walk down pat – as with Biff Elliot and Spillane, Assante confirms that a small, broad-chested Hammer has a bulldog rather than bully quality needed for character empathy in the page-to-screen transfer of the brawling hero. The Assante Hammer is outraged; he's prepared to risk anything for his goal, because his Hammer simply does not give a damn; if he dies in the course of his quest, so be it – "You take life too serious," he advises several terrified unwilling participants in his various war games. Another time he tells Charlotte that he "may take a few suspects out along the way – I'm not perfect." Dat's Mike Hammer, '80s style. [13]
