Born American

Year releasted: 1986

by Nathan Rabin
January 28th, 2004

In Born American, a drunken, heavily armed jaunt through barbed wire to the Soviet Union inexplicably goes awry for three American jackasses. Second-generation, second-tier action star Mike Norris (nephew of director Aaron Norris and son of Chuck Norris) stars as one of three backpackers cruising through Finland in what one charitably describes as a "cross between the Bluesmobile and the Batmobile." The adventurous young men shed their car when they decide to cross into the nearby Soviet Union for kicks. "Hey, just think about it," Norris says. "Only a couple hundred feet away, one of our fellow men has never tasted a Coca-Cola." (Bifocals-sporting brainiac David Coburn retorts that he's pretty sure the Russians drink Pepsi.) Shortly thereafter, the boys learn about the Commies' cola preference firsthand when they're wrongly framed for murder and end up in a ghoulish prison—where, sure enough, a guard guzzles Pepsi. When Norris bud Steve Durham openly expresses a wish that the guard will choke, the guard lightheartedly calls Durham a "humorist" and slashes his neck with the bottle. Matters worsen when a prison bigwig sporting a snazzy Josef Stalin look, complete with bushy eyebrows and matching mustache, accuses the Americans of being terrorists and subjects them to electrified nipple clamps. A tiny glimmer of hope arrives when a Rolls Royce-driving, caviar-munching, sex-slave-groping Western diplomat learns of the boys' plight, but that hope dissipates when the decadent diplomat lets the Stalin doppelgänger know in no uncertain terms that he wouldn't mind if the boys disappeared forever. Abandoned by his government, Coburn is quietly snuffed out in his sleep. Meanwhile, Durham gets locked in the bowels of the prison, where he functions as a literal pawn in a sadistic human sport that combines the strategy of chess with the visceral excitement of prisoners beating the shit out of each other. With the help of a shadowy soldier of fortune known as "The Admiral," Norris sets about freeing himself and his surviving chum. One exercising-and-reminiscing montage later, Norris is a lean, mean, Commie-killing machine, ready to make a run for the border and end what's undoubtedly the worst European vacation ever.