YMMV / Mitchell

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • For all his crassness and boozing, the fact Mitchell spends much of the movie pursuing Deaney to avenge the death of a nameless, non-white burglar no one else cares about should count for something.
  • Is Mitchell actually incompetent and just plain lucking his way through the movie? Or is he really a Guile Hero who's Obfuscating Stupidity, and letting everyone think he's as clueless as they believe?
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The scene where Mitchell gets into an argument with a small boy while on stakeout.
• Designated Hero: The title character is an alcoholic slob of a cop who behaves like a complete Jerkass most of the time, to the point that even the main villain tells him he needs to be nicer. Sure, he's a little more on the ball than his colleagues (only he suspects that Deaney may not have acted in self defense), but other than that he's a damn lousy cop. When a criminal tries to bribe him by sending him a prostitute, he actually sleeps with her.^note He doesn't know she's being paid, however.
• Harsher in Hindsight: With all the controversies involving police brutality and extrajudicial killings in recent times (at least in the United States), the tagline "Brute force with a badge" isn't particularly endearing.
• Narm:
  • In the uncut version (not the version used by Mystery Science Theater 3000) the fight with Deaney is this. He and a mook try to run over Mitchell using dune buggies, which is pretty goofy to begin with. The way Mitchell kills the mook is downright hilarious: the mook's buggy gets stuck on a rock, so Mitchell grabs a boulder, and starts bashing him to death while letting out an extremely silly wailing noise (he's probably meant to come across as a Screaming Warrior, but just seems like a doofus instead.)
  • The fight with Cummings at the end (where Mitchell and some cops are in a helicopter and Cummings and his mook are in a boat) instead of shooting at him (to be fair, they do try but don't hit anything) they use a buoy dangling from the helicopter to ram his boat. As the Agony Booth review puts it, it looks like they are attacking him with a giant yellow highlighter. Though Joel and the Bots don't think it's a bad idea.
    Servo: "I stand behind the idea of the Yellow Thing!"
• Special Effect Failure: The visible boom mike during the dinner scene; Joel helpfully points it out.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Aside from The '70s fashions, the very presence of Merlin Olson tips off the period. Olson was one of a few NFL players who were trying their hand at acting; at the time, he was best known. Olson would finally find his acting chops playing Jonathan Garvey in Little House on the Prairie.

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