Mike Hammer (Armand Assante) is pissed off. Wait one minute while we mention one of the initial problems we had with this particular version of Mickey Spillane and his titular character Mike Hammer. Recognize that Armand Assante is easily one of my favorite actors, but there’s oddly something that so NOT Mike Hammer about Armand Assante in this movie ‘I, The Jury’. He’s tough enough, that’s for sure, but Assante has more of a wise guy vibe as opposed to the required haggard gumshoe motif that Mike Hammer would need. Just mentioning that. Anyway, Mike is pissed off because somebody has gone and offed his one-armed Vietnam buddy, and in true mystery pulp fiction fashion, we saw the gun, we saw that this cat knew this murderer, but we didn’t see the killer. Who killed this guy and why? Well, by the time this movie was over I know the who but the why still has me a little baffled in this big old mess of an ancient action thriller.

So Mike has some investigating to do, first by talking to his buddy’s ex-wife who, to the surprise of no one, has endless fantasies about our strapping private eye. Seems his buddy was having some problems in the sack, and to fix this he was using the services of one Dr. Charlotte Bennett (Barbara Carrera). I hate to get sidetracked again but Barbara Carrera + 1981 = The honest to Goodness Truth. But what does having sexual problems have to do with a one armed man getting gunned down. Well, that’s kind of complicated. Super complicated. Unreasonably complicated.

I’m not completely sure but it looks like our government is doing some mind control experiments headed by some obscure Latin American general, and these experiments some kind of way involve the FBI and the mob. The dead one-armed buddy has knowledge of these experiments, though I don’t think he gave a damn about them one way or the other, but you know how these government spooks are when it comes to loose ends. Mike also has his guy, Detective Pat Chambers (Paul Sorvino), who is keeping Hammer abreast of the investigation and pointing him in the directions he needs to go when an ass kicking in is order. But is Detective Chambers really on Hammer’s side? Well, that’s complicated too.

Of course Hammer has his trusty sidekick in the Velda the Sultry Secretary (Laurene Landon) helping him, and Mike needs all the help he can get because wherever he goes, somebody always ends up dead. Somehow though, everything always leads back Dr. Bennett and her sex clinic. If you are having sex problems, I’m thinking this is place you want to go. This is the one thing that’s not complicated about ‘I, The Jury’, that being folks like to have a lot a sex at the good doctor’s sex clinic. In fact, judging by what I saw, it wasn’t looking like anybody was having any sexual problems at all. Maybe I caught them at that big orgy when they were all cured.

Orgies aside, who killed Mike’s buddy and why? Maybe having sex with Dr. Bennett will make things clearer. It didn’t, but it sure did look like a good time. Maybe the serial killer who hates red heads knows what was up. Serial Killer? Where the hell did that guy come from? Maybe the overdeveloped twin sexual surrogates have the 411. Who knows. What I do know is that Mike Hammer getting down and mad shootouts will be taking place.

To call ‘I, The Jury’ a convoluted mess would be selling the concept of convoluted messes way too short. I don’t know what term you would use to define this one. There’s the government conspiracy we are dealing with, the FBI angle, the Latin American angle, and then the mob involvement in this government conspiracy, plus I was never completely sure how the one-armed man figured into all of this, then by the time the serial killer showed up murdering his mother over and over again, I figured we might be in a little bit of trouble as far as lucidity was concerned. I did enjoy the final booby trapped explosion filled finale, though this too made almost no sense.

There’s a good chance that I might’ve caught this on HBO back in my early teen years, and the convolution of this whole exercise would’ve taken a back seat to the copious amounts of nudity, the fist fights, the shootouts and the serial killers, but today… not so much. The movie was directed Richard T. Heffron who made a name for himself directing episodic television back in the day, and to that effect the movie does have that late seventies TV feel in the way that it’s staged, looking like an episode of Mannix or Cannon, with the addition of orgasms, but way less clearer than what Mike Mannix used to do.

But all that being said ‘I, The Jury’ did have its charms, mainly Barbara Carerra naked and Armand Assante repeatedly shooting people to death. With a little more focus and a little less ambition as far as the narrative was concerned, we would’ve had a smutty instant classic, instead of a smutty incoherent mess. But at least it was smutty.