A thriller vehicle for the late Chuck Norris, the 1985 cop thriller Code Of Silence also anticipates RoboCop’s future of law enforcement. Robots? For much of the 1980s, you couldn’t miss them. There were toys. Dance crazes. Nintendo launched its first console in the west with the help of a faux robotic add-on. As automated ... Code Of Silence | The Chuck Norris film that captures a mid-1980s era of robot mania
A thriller vehicle for the late Chuck Norris, the 1985 cop thriller Code Of Silence also anticipates RoboCop’s future of law enforcement.
Robots? For much of the 1980s, you couldn’t miss them. There were toys. Dance crazes. Nintendo launched its first console in the west with the help of a faux robotic add-on. As automated technology began to revolutionise factory production lines early in the decade, there was a widespread expectation that robots would soon become commonplace elsewhere – either as glorified butlers or as mechanical soldiers on the battlefield.
The optimism (and anxiety) around a predicted robo-revolution was in plain view in 1980s cinema. There are the obvious science fiction movies that speculate about the end results of AI and robotics – James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), which turned a time-travelling cyborg into a slasher killer. There’s Michael Crichton’s Runaway, also released in 1984, which imagined an alternate 1980s of domestic robot helpers that sometimes run amok and kill their masters.
But robots also made surprising cameo appearances in films outside the sci-fi genre – and it’s perhaps these that are the most revealing of all.
This brings us to Code Of Silence: a 1985 thriller starring Chuck Norris at the height of his bearded, high-kicking pomp (and before he started spreading some incredibly grim opinions in his later years). Curiously, it’s both a throwback to the gritty cop movies of the 1970s, and, with its addition of a heavily-armed drone, a snapshot of 1980s robot mania. It could even be seen as the missing link between Dirty Harry and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop.
Norris, then better known for his martial arts prowess, stars as Chicago cop Eddie Cusack. Much of the film details his quest to bring down a Colombian drug lord named Luis Comacho (Henry Silva) and at the same time protect Diana (Molly Hagan) the teenage daughter of a Mafia guy who’s targeted by Comacho’s men.
Director Andrew Davis (later of The Fugitive and Under Siege fame) goes for a William Friedkin-esque sense of realism for much of the film, making the most of his Chicago locations and cast of character actors, including the great Dennis Farina (before he starred in Michael Mann’s Manhunter) and Ralph Foody, who’d later play the “Ya filthy animal” gangster in the Home Alone movies.
The script began life as a proposed Dirty Harry sequel, and it’s easy to imagine Clint Eastwood scowling through the same scenario – including a subplot involving Foody’s drunken detective and his accidental shooting of an unarmed civilian. Norris’s Eddie Cusack refuses to go along with the precinct’s attempt to cover up the incident (the titular ‘code of silence’), which sounds like something that the writers of the Dirty Harry sequels would have come up with for Harry Callahan, who was gradually moved away from the ‘facist pig’ extremes of his 1971 debut.
Read more: A few of cinema’s more unexpected and strange robots
What categorically doesn’t feel like something out of a Dirty Harry sequel, however, is the appearance of the aforementioned heavily-armed drone. In what initially feels like an extraneous scene, Cusack witnesses a live demonstration of the Prowler – an experimental gadget that looks like a miniature tank bristling with machine guns and rocket launchers.
Described as a ‘Programmable Robot with Logical Enemy Response’, it’s put through its paces by an engineer played by John Mahoney, who later played the ornery retired cop dad in Frasier. Remotely controlled with a positively huge handheld console, the Prowler is so simple that “even a child can operate it,” according to the engineer.
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“Pay attention,” a chief warns Cusack. “You’re gonna have to be qualified on this. It’s the future.”
Cusack is dismissive. “Just what the world needs, another gun without a brain,” he tuts.
“You’re looking at the perfect cop!” the chief insists. “The damn thing follows orders.”
The Prowler doesn’t appear again for at least half an hour. But then Diana’s kidnapped by Comacho’s small army of goons and taken to an abandoned warehouse. Cusack, loose cannon that he is, decides to storm the location himself – bringing the Prowler along for backup.
As the drone slaughters dozens of henchmen with rockets and bullets, it begins to look uncannily like ED-209 from Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, released two years later – both are grey, aggressive-looking, and absurdly over-powered for their proposed usage (they’re more suited to a battlefield than city streets).
The decaying, puddle-filled warehouse in which the battle takes place also looks like a location from Verhoeven’s ultra-violent classic. Code Of Silence was made by the same production company as RoboCop – Orion Pictures, who bought the script for about $800,000 when Warner Bros turned it down as a potential Dirty Harry film.
The ED-209 resemblance is, of course, almost certainly coincidental – the Prowler being simply another product of an era in which a future full of robots must have seemed inevitable. It was, after all, released the same year as Rocky IV, in which Sylvester Stallone’s titular boxer gives a robot butler to his layabout brother-in-law, Paulie. (In his later Rocky Vs Drago cut, Stallone rather cruelly edited the bot out of the picture.)
Indeed, what’s fascinating about Code Of Silence is that its writers (Michael Butler, Dennis Shryack and Mike Gray) must have added the Prowler in the assumption that audiences wouldn’t find it too ridiculous or far-fetched. Critics at the time certainly highlighted the film’s gritty realism. In his review, Roger Ebert described it as a “stylish urban action picture” with “carefully crafted performances.” Referring to the grand finale, with Norris gunning down bad guys with the aid of his mechanical helper, Ebert wrote that, “we can’t really believe the armoured robot tank that he brings into action, but what the hell, we accept it.”
In retrospect, the Prowler is the schlockiest aspect of a movie that is otherwise as impressive as Ebert described. Norris clearly performed a number of his own stunts, including a terrific punch-up on the top of a moving train; more surprisingly, given how disparagingly people wrote about his acting ability, he acquits himself well in the dramatic sequences, too.
Norris looks a little less comfortable when he has to interact with the Prowler, though – especially given that operating the killing machine involves prodding buttons on what looks like an absurdly-outsized hairdryer. But as 1980s kitsch as Code Of Silence’s final shoot-out might look to modern eyes, tech history now appears to have come full circle.
In 2026, we find ourselves in the middle of another hype cycle. This time, it’s surrounding various forms of artificial intelligence, though multiple companies, including OpenAI, are also dabbling in robotics. Much like Eddie Cusack in Code Of Silence, we’re repeatedly being told that AI is the future, and that we’re all “gonna have to get qualified on this.”
Notably, Code Of Silence doesn’t dwell on the dystopian implications of a cop-controlled drone capable of killing dozens of people with a press of a button. Putting aside his initial distaste, Cusack becomes an early adopter, wiping out a foreign drug pusher and his hoodlums with the power of cutting-edge technology.
Where RoboCop was a satire about corporate greed, tech-enabled police states and the dangers of privatisation, Code Of Silence is more breezily accepting of its imagined future of law enforcement. ED-209 was representative of America’s industrial decline – big, lumbering, impractical – and as a symbol of what happens when the military industrial complex begins to turn on its own citizens.
Code Of Silence’s Prowler is depicted as just a big, cool gadget – which, in a roundabout sort of way, makes it even more disquieting than ED-209.
Forty years on, and we aren’t quite in the world of ubiquitous robot butlers yet. But the drones are here, and tech giants keep telling us that artificial general intelligence is just around the corner. Viewed like this, Code Of Silence and films like it look both charmingly of their time and eerily close to the mark.
