Two things I love: ridiculously bad films, and bargain price DVDs. So when we spotted Toughest Man In The World, a 1984 TV movie starring Mr T for $5.99 in the Specials/Cheap pile at my local video store, a friend and I thought we’d give it a try. It would be, in some ways, the equivalent of consuming movie junk food: cheap, nasty, yet still inexplicably and morbidly satisfying. But what does one expect from a Mr T film, really, especially a doubt-raising one like this with a PG-rating? What sort of anticipation is humanly possible for such an anomalous celebrity, particularly someone like Mr T who seemed to have somehow achieved fame and a copious amount of jewellery for no real reason at all? Unintentional humour is all well and good, however there must come a point where such blatant disregard for basic standards of one’s mental health turns horribly into a sick form of sadomasochism, particularly when this kind of trash is on the cover:

Well all right then: Junk food, check. S&M, check. Onto the review.

After about five minutes in, not taking into account the opening rap song performed by Mr T himself, it becomes immediately evident that this man has no acting ability nor discernible talent whatsoever. It also comes as a shock to realise that, contrary to the popular image of him being a muscular and scary behemoth, he is actually quite short, overweight, and in such obvious distress trying to memorise his lines that you actually start to, ahem, pity the fool.

So this is the result of the Hollywood decision to try and soften the image of Mr T; to make him more endearing and less attached to his previous roles in The A-Team and Rocky III (as B.A. Baracus and Clubber Lang, respectively). By coming up with a fresh character for him to play, Bruise Brubaker (with the exact same hairstyle he’s had for his entire life, mind you), this was Mr T reborn, reincarnated with the qualities of compassion, selflessness, and love; none of which makes any difference because, at the end of the day, Mr T can only be Mr T: and Mr T’s only emotion is that permanently strained and confused angry look on Mr T’s face, no matter how hard they tried to turn him into Buddha.

By the time Bruise befriends (rather too easily it must be said) an annoying 80s pre-pubescent ‘tough street kid’ by inviting him back to his place (seriously), it also becomes shockingly obvious that this film is entirely self-serving and indulgent that if you were hoping for entertainment rather than 90 minutes of brown-nosing then you’re in for a painful experience. But let us not stray off-topic: when not busy volunteering at the local youth community centre and teaching kids important lessons on morality whilst wearing purple leotards that really need to be seen to be believed, Bruise earns a living as a tuxedo-wearing bouncer at an upper class Chicago nightclub where he is treated as a key, integral pillar of society. Where even the police know him on a first name basis and give him all the time in the world. Where he resists the urge for violence and resolves potential conflict from body-building drunks through the power of spoken word. Where you realise that this is, forget about Buddha, basically a retelling of the life of Jesus with Mr T in the lead role and suddenly you get the compelling urge to simply turn the DVD off but can’t because you just want to hang around to see whether he gets nailed to a cross by the end of it. Spoiler warning: he doesn’t, and in the opinion of this reviewer such an omission hurts the film.

So then it turns out that the community centre needs to find a source of funding otherwise it will be shut down, leading to Bruise enlisting in the upcoming Toughest Man In The World contest which makes as much sense as the baseball World Series consisting entirely of American teams and just so happens to be in a few weeks’ time and held in town. This leads to about an hour’s worth of discomfort as we watch Bruise go through the 80s prerequisite training montage footage clearly ripping off Rocky as well as some awful subplot involving his love interest and the mafia until we get to the actual event, which is a total joke anyway as he wins it by running through an obstacle course wall rather than climbing over it like everybody else and doesn’t get disqualified.

Overall I’d say the best parts of this movie were when my accomplice, for perhaps the first and only ever time such a moment will occur, referred to Mr T as a ‘fat shit’, and the potential to be had were one to use video editing software to splice together the most inappropriate dialogue scenes for schadenfreudian YouTube consumption purposes such that the footage comes across (more clearly) as a B-grade censored snuff film (again, PG rated). In the end, Toughest Man In The World wasn’t quite bad enough to be good nor good enough to be respectable, existing merely as a lesser-of-two-evils choice: a shitty DVD for one meaningless cent less than six bucks versus a guilty Value Meal’s worth of junk food where both options, much like a bucket of KFC (or, for that matter, too many Snickers bars), leave you with a common outcome of feeling sick and regretful afterwards.

*In doing research for this review, or rather just looking for obscure screenshots, lots of credit must go to the following site dedicated to this film with appreciably condescending comments: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/9540/mrscreen.html. In some ways I’m shocked that I am only the 82nd visitor to this web page, ever, since the dawn of its creation, but then again what the hell were all 82 of us thinking? In any case if you’re reading this then please click on the link as a sign of respect; let’s aim to get the hits at least up to 100.