If this configuration of Dalton and his padawan-learner Jack looks familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. The exchange and fight scene that are about to occur are perhaps the purest distillation of the Dalton Path in the entire film, following the Three Simple Rules and their various chapters and verses to the letter. As a bonus they show the primacy and utility of Jack among the Double Deuce’s other bouncers. It is Jack, after all, to whom Dalton relays the Riddle of the Right Boot, counting on the younger man to solve it. When they move on the intruders who’ve come to the bar to murder a man by kicking him in the head with a boot-mounted knife on account of the fact that he fired a rich guy’s nephew, they move as one.
But how did they arrive at this point? By what strange magic were Dalton and Jack united at this moment? The magic…of rock.
Specifically Carrie Ann’s variant thereof. The big-grinned barmaid with the bangs has traditionally occupied a privileged position in Dalton’s orbit. It is she to whom he first entrusts the secret of his name. It is she who preaches his name to the other barfolk. It is she who is granted a glimpse of the ass.
Now that the Double Deuce has been cleaned up, it is she who takes the stage to demonstrate this fact to the viewer. Would any woman have been caught dead on the stage of the old Double Deuce, where the only thing separating you from the ravening hordes, whose attention is drawn to and focused on that stage in a way no other staffer or patron can claim, was a thin chickenwire line? To be honest, dead might be the only way a woman would get caught on that thing. Putting a blind guy up there strikes me as some kind of ADA violation as it is.
But now things are different. How different? Different enough that a server is up there singing her gorgeous, joyful heart out. (Kathleen Wilhoite is truly one of this movie’s MVPs; I have no doubt from the way she shakes and grooves and grins and at one point even puts her hand to her face like “holy shit I can’t believe this!” is a sign of completely sincere pleasure on the part of the actor herself.) A few weeks earlier she had to save all her vocal power for yelling “BASTARD!” at people she’d just brained with a beer bottle in a barfight. Now she’s singing Eddie Floyd with the Jeff Healey Band.
That’s why Jack drifts over to Dalton that night: Just to smile with delight and say “I didn’t know she could sing!” He’s so happy in that moment, so happy to see someone he thought he knew reveal a new and exciting side of herself, so happy to know that as a bouncer on the Dalton Path he helped make that happen. It’s his desire to share that happiness that puts him by Dalton’s side when Ketchum strides in, anonymous minions by his side, to try to kickstab Dalton in the skull. The right place at the right time, that time being “time to not be nice.”
Call it a coincidence if you want, or even synchronicity. I call it the ne plus ultra illustration of the Third Rule, and of how the obervance of that rule yields dividends none could predict. Be Nice, commands Dalton. So mote it be.
Tags: be nice, bouncers, carrie ann, cody, dalton, goons, jack, jeff healey, ketchum, staff, the jeff healey band, the rules, the third rule