Ah, the ‘80s. It was a time when disbelief was much more easily suspended in movie theaters across America. That led to the Roy Scheider vehicle, Blue Thunder, making an impressive $42 million in 1983, doubling its budget thanks to a helicopter-based action plot that presaged Top Gun by combining a fighter pilot film with new helicopter and computer technology being developed in the early ’80s. It was a weird, in-between time when many neo-noir films like 8 Million Ways to Die and To Live and Die in LA were romanticizing the ex-military LAPD officers who dominated Hollywood-adjacent crime films of the rugged ’80s. Directors like Hal Ashby and William Friedkin and Blue Thunder director John Badham were trying out a style made famous by ’70s films like The French Connection, only with a much less cerebral and more high-octane approach.