Director: Hal Needham
Plot: In the film that dragged the shotgun marriage of rock and wrestling onto the big screen in the most perfunctory manner imaginable, sentient Ken Doll Dirk Benedict, truly the Bradley Cooper of the ’80s, plays a smiling man with all the accoutrements of professional ambition in the Reagan-era: blindingly slick hair, a cigar to chomp at opportune moments, a football-sized portable telephone (fancy!) and a never-ending line of slick patter.
When Benedict’s heat in the music industry cools, he stumbles into a new sideline when he poaches wrestler Roddy Piper from apoplectic manager Captain Lou Albano. Albano, playing himself alongside a fair number of other real-life wrestling luminaries, dominates the local wrestling scene, so Benedict is forced to look for new venues for his acts to play. In a fit of inspiration, Benedict decides to cross-pollinate sub-mediocrity by pairing the forgettable pop-rock sounds of the band Kicks with the lazily choreographed, indifferently executed grappling action of Benedict’s stable of steroid abusers.
The wrestling milieu gives the film what little excuse it needs to pad its running time with sequences indistinguishable from the kind of filler you’d find on World Wrestling Federation matches at the time: fights, shouting matches, the whole nine. This clip occupies some sad netherworld between the arch-theatricality of WWF and conventional bad film acting. Wrestling acting is like porn acting: It doesn’t have to be good, merely functional. It only has to get the action from one place to another. Even by those standards, the acting here fails.
Benedict intermittently chomps his cigar in a slightly less aggressive fashion to convey his character’s spiritual growth. At first it was all about money, but Benedict ultimately wants to do the right thing, so when the tag-team duo he manages ends up climactically winning the championship, he uses his cut of the winnings to pay back Tanya Roberts, a love interest so arbitrary she could be forgiven for forgetting that she even appeared in the film. Benedict’s fighters emerge victorious and the sacred marriage of rock and wrestling is officially and climactically consummated.
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