Would America have been kinder to its Vietnam veterans if it weren't so easy to manipulate them into carrying out vendettas for aging gangsters? Maybe, and maybe not. But in The Stone Killer, veteran New York detective Charles Bronson has little time to ponder such questions. As the film opens, Bronson earns a one-way ticket to Los Angeles after killing a panicky gunman in an abandoned building. "The kid was only 17," one of Bronson's coworkers objects. Bronson's reply: "The gun made him older." That kind of logic seems to go over better on the West Coast, where Bronson, still wearing a trenchcoat in spite of his sunny surroundings, works with a green rookie played by John Ritter and answers to Norman Fell, the chief of detectives (and Ritter's future Three's Company landlord). Fell assigns Bronson to investigate unexplained murders involving Vietnam vets, and the case leads him through a seedy trail of lesbian-owned record stores, black-power meetings, vegetarian ashrams where hippies ride cows, and other locations that allow Bronson to stare stonily in tacit disapproval of a world gone crazy. After heatedly pursuing the bisexual jazz trombonist (Paul Koslo) who seems to be behind it all, Bronson catches wind of an even bigger scheme. Soon, he's headed back to New York City and directly into the action—the microfilm action, that is. Deep in the recesses of the archives, Bronson discovers that all the recent activity is tied to the 42nd anniversary of a mob hit, that the Vietnam veterans were part of a private army hired to take out the men responsible for the hit, and that the bisexual trombonist was only a pawn in the game. And what better way to take down an army than with lots of gunplay? Bullets fly in a finale that leaves dozens of traumatized veterans dead, Bronson looking more grim than usual, and, presumably, a nation finally ready to put a divisive war behind it.
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