Book Review : Adam Howe - One Tough Bastard (2021)
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Getting old is a peculiar brand of mindfuck. It makes you think that you know better, but you fucking don’t. Because the younger generations are changing the world faster than you can keep up with, so you can either embrace the fact that you will never know shit or become the old man yelling at clouds:
For example, I love cocaine era action movies: Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Burt Reynolds, whoever committed to over-the-top violence and righteous one liners. But I would hate to have them today. They were a symptom of their time, where every Hollywood studio exec were coked out of their mind. It was great. Perhaps there will never be anything like this, but I’m glad it belongs to the past. Great things have to end in order to remain great.
If I’m taking such a roundabout way to discuss Adam Howe’s new novel One Tough Bastard is that I should’ve liked it. It has everything that I like in it: a ridiculous premise, an outdated Hollywood star, a chimpanzee that talks like Kevin Spacey, explosions, martial arts, braggadocio, you name it. While it was entertaining and certainly unpredictable, it ultimately fell flat for me. What the fuck is wrong with me? Am I losing my shit?
It’s complicated.
It’s definitely not the what
The idea of One Tough Bastard is fucking great. Washed up action hero Shane Moxie is getting ambushed by a death squad at an anniversary screening of Copsicle, a prehistoric buddy cop movie he starred in alongside a talking ape named Duke. Even if they hate each other, Moxie and Duke decide to team up to find who shot the theater and exert vengeance over what they lost. Mostly a career and a wife. I know, right? It’s fucking wild.
One Tough Bastard is one of the sneakiest metafictional novels I’ve ever read. So sneaky, I’m not even sure Adam Howe even knew he was writing metafiction then. It’s a buddy cop comedy about two guys who starred in a buddy cop comedy together. The rules of reality and Hollywood action movies are completely mixed up and it’s great. For example, Moxie is a washed up actor, but he’s inexplicably badass. It doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to.
I love how the idea of reality itself is plied and deformed in this book. It feels like the characters are convinced they’re starring in a movie and they almost are. They’re starring in a novel. Whether Moxie and Duke are involved in a fistfight or a gunfight, the stakes are skewed. Suddenly, it’s not really a matter of life and death for them. It’s a matter of looking cool and kicking ass. It’s all over the place, but it is so by design, which you have to respect.
It’s definitely the who
It took me a while to figure out while I couldn’t get myself to push my chips for One Tough Bastard, but I found it. It’s Shane Moxie himself. He doesn’t work. He’s not really a character. He’s more of a collection of clichés and cultural stereotypes with associate with washed up actors: the ego, the forged tough guy credentials, the weird fashion statements. He doesn’t have a personality outside of that and it was a major problem to me.
I didn’t know who Moxie was as a person, but he reminded me of twenty actors from Jean-Claude Van Damme to Gary Busey all rolled up in one. That doesn’t sound like such a problem? I agree. The problem lies further ahead. Since he doesn’t have a personality of his own, Moxie becomes kind of what One Tough Bastard requires him to become along the way. He is a human plot-forwarding device with a lot of mullet jokes attached to him.
There was obviously an element of slapstick humor at play here, but the emotional connection is absent. Chuck Palahniuk said it best: it doesn’t matter if your protagonist is sympathetic or relatable. He only needs to be interesting. Shane Moxie lacks all three of these qualities. He evolves in a weird, super dynamic environment that’s halfway between Jay & Bob Strikes Back and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but he doesn’t make it shine.
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Well, that’s what I had to say about One Tough Bastard. I preferred the previous book from Adam Howe I reviewed Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet. But understand that I read a lot of these and I came to develop certain triggers that will either hook me into a novel or not. Didn’t quite click for me and One Tough Bastard. I love the ideas and the dynamism, but it would’ve been carried better by a livelier lead than Shane Moxie. Sorry Moxie, you suck.
