Review of The Delta Force (1986) by Michael Y — 06 Sep 2010

The eighties was a time when action movies had a way of taking shameful things from American history and making them somehow okay. We got ourselves into a bit of a clusterfuck there with Vietnam, but guys like Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris came along and made sure we retroactively won that shit, and won it HARD. Norris, however, was not content to only reach back to the days of 'Nam, not here anyway. THE DELTA FORCE, which is based on the disastrous TWA flight hijacking in Athens, Greece a year earlier in 1985 (this came out in '86), takes what was a pretty bad situation and dramatizes it with the message that this would've all been okay if only Chuck were there.

DELTA FORCE was directed by Menahem Golan, half of the Golan-Globus production team that headed the tits-up Cannon Group, the film company that gave the world such gems as SUPERMAN IV, OVER THE TOP, and, for all you fellow Rhodes alums out there, MAKING THE GRADE. As you may have guessed, Golan & Globus weren't known for their quality films, but you'd think they'd at least know how to pace a picture. Clocking in at a staggering two hours and nine minutes, DELTA FORCE feels like two movies smashed together like a crushed sandwich that contains hamburger and chicken, the first being an attempt at a real-life flight-hijacking drama and the second being a B-level action film. Pull out 30-45 minutes of the former plot line and you have something tight and shitty, but at least watchable and fun in a movie-you-can-rag-on sort of way. What we have here just drags and drags until I felt about as tired as the people being held hostage on the plane (the lack of booze during this viewing may have contributed to this).

Chuck Norris stars, bafflingly, alongside what used to be Lee Marvin, who looks so long in the tooth you gotta wonder if his health permitted him to be there (Marvin died a year after making this). Norris plays a dude who's too old for this shit (as though Marvin isn't) and retires to his "horse farm" only to be called back into action for one last job (by the President himself of course). Norris as usual is practically a wallflower throughout the movie, only becoming active in the plot when there's some ass to kick, but this is something I've come to expect, we will always know the bad guys better than we'll ever know Chuck Norris. The best action set piece comes when Chuck rides around on a motorcycle equipped with rear missile launchers, he rides past his enemies, looks at them with as though he's about to fart, and blows them up via his rear end. Those sequences alone made this one worth my time, that and the return of Chuck's all-denim fashion sense. The movie ends with the newly free passengers singing patriotic hymns to America while they all drink Budweiser, courtesy of Uncle Sam's Army, while Chuck and Lee Marvin sadly go off in the distance, knowing the true cost of freedom after one of their teammates fell in battle. The message here folks, is freedom isn't free, it costs folks like you and me. And if you don't put in your buck o' five, who will? And if you do, you too can blow up terrorists with missiles that rocket out of the ass of your motorcycle.