Louis Gossett Jr.

Try story, this guy is still alive and working. Actually according to IMDB he is working rather healthily and I praise him. Hes doing voice work in a lot of things which is cool. The point of this post though isn't to reminise about how great Gossett has been...but rather to expose some of the low points in his career. Ok not even that. This is just to make fun of the Iron Eagle series and the movie Toy Soliders.

Iron Eagle came out in 1986. A weak wannabe Top Gun that didn't have the budget that Top Gun had and basically was not good. It was a laughable 80's film. Here is where things get funny though. Top Gun spawned no sequels...Iron Eagle spawned 3 more movies! By Iron Eagle III we're dealing with prop planes attacking other planes to stop some random drug lord...or something. Its fucking terrible. Louis Gossett Jr. has an Oscar also. Why does this matter? Because its probably one of the few Oscars that the Academy wishes they could take back.

The other movie I want to talk about is Toy Soldiers. Toy Soldiers is a harrowing tale of a prep school for boys being taken over by Colombian terrorists. I just saw this on tv today and the first thing that blew my mind was this movie clearly had some sort of budget. There is a big action set piece at the end and it had multiple blackhawk helicopters and an Apache helo too. The movie turns into a kind of Great Escape adolescent teen film where the kids come up with multiple "Macgyver" like contraptions and traps to outwit the terrorists. This movie even has Sean Astin in it. So where does the LOU man fit in? Well he is the hardass teacher Dean Parker. Instead of summarizing the movie I'm going to ruin it for you. The head terrorist dies when Lou jumps through a window and shoots the terrorist but not before getting shot right in the left lung. The best part about it though is that Gossett just shrugs the gun shot off. He is shot in the left lung and he is able to walk out with just a bandage over his wound. True American Hero Folks.