I find it odd that a movie can claim to have been a precursor to both cinema verité and the “Death Wish” franchise. “Billy Jack” was a cult film from 1971 that spawned a number of sequels thanks to its gun-slinging, hapkido expert title hero as well as its progressive agenda. And yet the uber-violence that comes from characters who otherwise claim to be pacifists is a bizarre double standard the movie doesn’t really account for.
It’s a good example of how even an interesting film the ’70s has proved to be more problematic, dated and poorly emblematic of the time period than something from an older generation. The movie foregrounds racial persecution with your typical assortment of one-dimensional hicks who are casually hateful of minorities and have fun with it (there’s an absurd scene inside an ice cream parlor where a white teenager pulls a ladle of flour from thin air and proceeds to pour it on the heads of the Native Americans in the store), but it also stinks of the obstinate hippie type who seem to be posing more problems than they are mending. A teenage girl at the film’s center is brought home from Haight-Ashbury to inform her father that she has hepatitis, a rotted tooth, has not eaten in two days and is six weeks pregnant from an unknown father and has the nerve to be snarky about it.
“Billy Jack” struggles with its tone because its writer, director and star, Tom Laughlin, has an equally disjointed approach to his filmmaking. The dialogue before an equally clumsy fight scene reminds of campy, vigilante B-movies and other token badassery, while the scenes inside the progressive school or at a town hall hearing rely on candid, fly on the wall storytelling to a fault. The cinema verité approach is so transparently obvious here that it in fact takes away from the characters’ profundity and reality. They’re archetypes plucked from documentaries shouting late ’60s talking points and causes from off microphone, not fleshed out characters who we would accept in the hands of someone else.
The movie advocates that in the end, a rifle may be more powerful and effective than the law in the pursuit of justice, which is a troubling thought on its own, but “Billy Jack” certainly can’t have it both ways.