Movie Review: Invasion U.S.A. (1985)

Genre: Action  

Director: Joseph Zito  

Starring: Chuck Norris, Richard Lynch  

Running Time: 107 minutes  

Synopsis: Heavily-armed terrorists assembled by evil masterminds Rostov (Richard Lynch) and Nikko (Alexander Zale) land on a Miami beach, jump into waiting trucks, spread out into neighbourhoods, and start slaughtering civilians. Retired CIA Agent Matt Hunter (Chuck Norris) is Rostov's nemesis, and returns to action to stop the carnage. Meanwhile, a reporter (Melissa Prophet) tries to cover the story.

What Works Well: Retreading the America-under-attack threat from Red Dawn, this B-movie deploys a relatively large budget to unleash impressive destruction, including residential homes and a shopping mall slated for demolition in real life. The stunt performers are the real stars, dodging danger amidst the pyrotechnics. 

What Does Not Work As Well: The early scenes tracking the terrorists getting organized (involving the Coast Guard, a drug deal, and an arms depot) appear to be fragments of incomplete ideas, and the subsequent endless action set-pieces fail to coalesce into a movie. Despite the generous running time, not even rudimentary attempts are made to round-out the characters or describe the ultimate objective (or backers) of the ragtag invasion. A largely disinterested but absolutely indestructible Chuck Norris cruises through the action spouting a variety of one-liners but careful to maintain a singular expression.

Key Quote:

Rostov: 18 hours from now, America will be a different place.

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Movie Review: Good Guys Wear Black (1978)

Genre: Action  

Director: Ted Post  

Starring: Chuck Norris, Anne Archer, Dana Andrews, James Franciscus  

Running Time: 96 minutes  

Synopsis: In 1973, Senator Conrad Morgan (James Franciscus) is leading negotiations to end the Vietnam War. A CIA special forces unit known as the Black Tigers, led by Major John T. Booker (Chuck Norris), is ambushed while on a covert mission to rescue American prisoners in the Vietnam jungle. Five years later in Los Angeles, Booker is approached by the mysterious Margaret (Anne Archer), who is asking questions about the botched mission. Booker learns that other Tiger veterans are being murdered, and uncovers a conspiracy.

What Works Well: This lower-budget effort provides Chuck Norris with a career boost away from pure martial arts movies (although he does chop his way through a few action scenes). The plot has decent ambitions to combine mistrust of government agendas with regular bursts of action, and director Ted Post occasionally threatens to breach not-bad levels. Dan Andrews enlivens a couple of scenes with seen-it-all cynicism.

What Does Not Work As Well: The sequence in the Vietnam jungle is too dark to discern what is going on. All the characters lack depth, and despite a decent cast, the acting is strictly monotonal. Norris displays a remarkable inability to display any emotion, and so making love to Margaret or reacting to the death of colleagues all come and go with the same cold detachment. Loose ends and logic gaps prevail, and in the jumbled rush to find an ending, plenty of conspiracy specifics go missing in action.

Key Quote:

John Booker (realizing the mission is compromised): Everything went wrong by the numbers. And that takes planning.

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Movie Review: Firewalker (1986)

Genre: Adventure  

Director: J. Lee Thompson  

Starring: Chuck Norris, Louis Gossett Jr., Melody Anderson, Will Sampson, John Rhys-Davies  

Running Time: 104 minutes  

Synopsis: Dim-witted adventurers Max and Leo (Chuck Norris and Louis Gossett Jr.) are hired by the mysterious Patricia (Melody Anderson) to find a gold treasure. Their search takes them to an Indian Reservation mountaintop where they find a magical dagger and meet Tall Eagle (Will Sampson). Next they travel to San Miguel, where they tangle with local bandits and are rescued by old ally Corky (John Rhys-Davies). All the while they are hunted by the evil El Coyote (Sonny Landham), an Aztec descendant seeking enormous power.

What Works Well: Melody Anderson brings strong-willed and capably likeable presence to Patricia.

What Does Not Work As Well: This is a low budget, low talent, exhaustingly awful Cannon Group production designed to cash in on Raiders Of The Lost Ark-type adventurism. The misguided attempt to wedge Chuck Norris' stoic persona into a talkative lighthearted action comedy is predictably catastrophic, and the support from more refined actors like Louis Gossett Jr., John Rhys-Davies, and Will Sampson is wasted on an inane script. With no coherent plot points, director J. Lee Thompson resorts to a series of uninspired set-pieces staged within cheap cardboard sets. 

Key Quote:

Patricia: What scares you, Max?

Max: Suits, alarm clocks, apartment buildings.

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Movie Review: Code Of Silence (1985)

Genre: Action  

Director: Andrew Davis  

Starring: Chuck Norris, Henry Silva  

Running Time: 100 minutes  

Synopsis: After a violent gang-on-gang drug den raid, Chicago mobster Luis Comacho (Henry Silva) seeks revenge on the rival outfit of Tony Luna (Mike Genovese). Tough-as-nails Police Sergeant Eddie Cusack (Chuck Norris) anticipates the wave of violence and tries to protect Luna's innocent daughter Diana (Molly Hagan). His job is complicated by tensions within the police force, where past-it Detective Cragie (Ralph Foody) has planted evidence to cover-up the accidental killing of a bystander. 

What Works Well: The casting of Chuck Norris and Henry Silva on opposite sides of the law creates an epic duel of the expressionless stonefaces, adding macho joy to the bouncy vibe of this action-packed thriller. Director Andrew Davis rises well above the acting talent, budget, and plot, using numerous Chicago locations to stage competent and sometimes clever set-pieces, stunts, and chases. The likes of Dennis Farina and John Mahoney lurk deep within the cast list, although they are upstaged by a clunky-but-still-cute and heavily armed police robot on wheels.

What Does Not Work As Well: All the characters are in-you-face stock representations of good and evil without a visible morsel of depth, context, background, or self-awareness. It's never quite clear if the relationship between Eddie and Diana is supposed to be parental or something ickier.

Key Quote:

Eddie: When I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you.

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Movie Review: Lone Wolf McQuade (1983)

Genre: Action  

Director: Steve Carver  

Starring: Chuck Norris, David Carradine, Barbara Carrera  

Running Time: 108 minutes  

Synopsis: In El Paso, JJ McQuade (Chuck Norris) is a Texas Ranger and martial arts expert, unwillingly teamed with the inexperienced "Kayo" Ramos (Robert Beltran). JJ meets the alluring Lola (Barbara Carrera), who is in a relationship with shady businessman (and also martial arts expert) Rawley Wilkes (David Carradine). A violent weapons heist in the area draws the attention of the FBI's Agent Jackson (Leon Isaac Kennedy). Despite initial tension, JJ, Kayo, and Jackson team up to investigate, leading to a showdown with Wilkes.

What Works Well: In a bad movie with much to love, the sheer audacity of teleporting peak Spaghetti Western vibes into modern-day Texas has to be saluted. A few sunbaked shots are epic (including McQuade in full-glory silhouette), and the overblown Francesco De Masi music score does not leave a single Morricone note behind. The final showdown between McQuade and Wilkes is a bone-crunching legend, only surpassed by the jaw-dropping spectacle of McQuade (with beer in hand) and his truck emerging from the grave. The supporting cast includes Western stalwarts R.G. Armstrong and L.Q. Jones.

What Does Not Work As Well: All the writing, acting, staging, and plot points land with the tinny clang of cringey low budget incompetence, and the attempts at a romance between Norris and Carrera are awkward enough to be simultaneously hilarious and tragic. McQuade punches, kicks, or shoots a deserving target seemingly every minute of every day.

Key Quote:

Jackson: It's like somebody doesn't like you McQuade.

McQuade: I make a few enemies here and there.

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The Movies Of Chuck Norris

All movies starring Chuck Norris and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Good Guys Wear Black (1978)

Silent Rage (1982)

Lone Wolf McQuade (1983)

Missing In Action (1984)

Missing In Action 2: The Beginning (1985)

Code Of Silence (1985)

Invasion U.S.A. (1985)

The Delta Force (1986)

Firewalker (1986)

Braddock: Missing In Action III (1988)

Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection (1990)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Silent Rage (1982)

A sometimes astoundingly bad mishmash of warmed-over horror, superfluous martial arts, and oafish romance, Silent Rage temptingly flirts with the "so bad it's good" category but settles for just plain incompetent.

In an unnamed small Texas town, former mental patient John Kirby (Brian Libby) loses his grip on reality, gains enormous physical strength and murders two people. Eventually overpowered and injured by Sheriff Dan Stevens (Chuck Norris) with no help from his incompetent and overweight deputy Charlie (Stephen Furst), Kirby is hospitalized seemingly close to death.

But the local hospital has a secret wing controlled by three doctors experimenting with powerful cell regenerating drugs. The ring leader is the egotistical Doctor Spires (Steven Keats), who overcomes the objections of the more reasonable Doctor Halman (Ron Silver) and injects Kirby with a super-healing formula that renders him nearly indestructible. Kirby is soon loose and spreading terror killing everyone in sight, with Halman and his wife among the targets. Stevens has to interrupt a revived romance with Halman's sister Alison (Toni Kalem) to put an end to the carnage.

With production values that rival the best efforts of dim high school kids, Silent Rage throws an unending assortment of derived ideas at the screen in a malarkey mix of ineptitude. The premise revisits Frankenstein, the horror elements are a poor attempt to mimic Halloween, the main martial arts sequence (Stevens takes on a gang of bikers) has nothing to do with the movie, the attempts at sidekick humour in the person of Charlie the Deputy are painfully unfunny, the so-called romance between Stevens and Alison must have been mechanically scripted by a machine fed on all wooden lines that could possibly infiltrate a relationship, and the movie is sprinkled with gratuitous tits just to emphasize the standard of ambition.

Directed by Michael Miller, whose talent subsequently consigned him to a career helming cheap made-for-TV movies, Silent Rage accurately describes the burning anger at Chuck Norris and Brian Libby for prolonging the movie with an endless final confrontation. When things are this bad, it does not matter who lives and who dies, or why: the credits just can't come soon enough.

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Movie Review: Braddock: Missing In Action III (1988)

This time, it's about the kids. Braddock's third and mercifully final adventure takes him back into Vietnam to rescue a bunch of Amerasian kids, including his son. No matter; Braddock: Missing In Action III is as bad as can be expected.

During the chaotic final hours of the war, with Saigon in the throes of falling to the communists, Colonel James Braddock (Norris) tries to find and evacuate his Vietnamese wife Lin (Miki Kim). But in a case of mistaken identity, he is led to believe that she died in a mortar strike, while in reality she has survived and is left behind. Unbeknownst to him, she is also pregnant.

Many years later, Braddock is visited by Reverend Polanski (Yehuda Efroni), who insists that Lin and their son Van Tan Cang (Roland Harrah III) are alive but destitute, living near Polanski's mission in Ho Chi Minh City. Despite the usual warnings from the faceless CIA suits, Braddock travels to Thailand and prepares for yet another adventure to invade Vietnam, re-fight the war, and attempt to rescue his family along with a large number of Amerasian children who are being mistreated by the Vietnamese.

This is rudimentary movie making by the misguided made for the enjoyment of the feeble-minded. In a summary of the intellect behind the script assembled in crayons by no less than four people, the Vietnamese officials all hiss with evil intent and clearly enjoy torturing adults and kids alike. Braddock is the only person who knows wrong from right and is ready to kick butt throughout Southeast Asia to prove it. And when it comes to surviving an onslaught, Braddock can drive a bus full of children through the Vietnamese countryside while avoiding countless helicopter-launched missiles aimed straight at him.

To make sure that Braddock: Missing In Action III finds its worldwide target audience, Braddock's key weapon in his latest one-man battle against the Vietnamese army is a massive machine gun equipped with a multi-grenade launcher and a bayonet. Apparently custom-made for the movie, it is a perfect prop to get the testosterone of the easily impressed pumping hard enough to mask the horrid entertainment on display.

Creating this brain-dead celebration of explosions unfortunately cost the lives of four people in a helicopter crash in the Philippines, and a couple of years later director Aaron Norris would also be in charge of Delta Force 2, in which five more people were killed in another helicopter crash during filming. The era of Cannon Films' low-budget action movies thankfully drew to a close before any more lives were lost in pursuit of unleashing additional atrocities on the senses.

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Movie Review: Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection (1990)

Probably all that needs to be said about the quality of Delta Force 2: The Colombia Connection is that Colombia has nothing to do with the movie. Instead, this routine Chuck Norris action flick is set in the fictional country of San Carlos. It would not matter if the setting was a retirement home for the deaf in a suburb of Topeka: at the end of any Norris movie, Norris will blow up whatever the main set happens to be.

Drug lord Ramon Cota (Billy Drago) pretty much runs San Carlos, aided by the country's chief general and a weak president happy to turn a blind eye. Cota exports large quantities of drugs into the United States, and runs circles around the efforts of the Drug Enforcement Agency to put a stop to his activities. The DEA turns to Delta Force for assistance, allowing Major Bobby Chavez (Paul Perri) and Colonel Scott McCoy (Norris) to extract Cota into the US. He is promptly released on bail and immediately unleashes a vicious revenge on Chavez and his family, and takes a few DEA agents as hostages for good measure.

Enough being enough, McCoy and a small Delta Force contingent, with the help of the eccentric General Taylor (John P. Ryan) commanding a single helicopter, infiltrate San Carlos on a mission to raze the drug plantation fields, destroy Cota's mountaintop headquarters and rescue the hostages.

Arriving at the end of the era of mindless B-movie action shooters churned out by Cannon Films, and costing the lives of five crewmen in a tragic on-set helicopter crash, the sequel to The Delta Force is less ambitious, more routine and certainly more predictable. But the film does manage a couple of things well: Ramon Cota is a suitably abhorrent evil character, well portrayed by Billy Drago, and the Lee Reynolds script takes the necessary time to build him up into an enemy worth eliminating. As well, there are a couple of terrific martial arts sequences, the best a showdown between McCoy and Cota's chief henchman Carlos (played by Rick Prieto with a severe case of bad haircut).

But everywhere else Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection lives down to the minimalist expectations, and then stoops even lower. Director Aaron Norris ensures that the helicopters never run out of rocket ammunition and that the same bad guy extras die a dozen times each; and captures dialogue straight from the school of monosyllabic muscular tough guys. The supporting actors are plucked from the "where are they know" files and the "hire anyone with a pulse willing to appear on film for next-to-nothing" system of casting. There is also a badly handled sub-story about a local woman who loses her husband and child to Cota's atrocities, but her long quest for revenge ends with an anticlimactic fizzle.

Topping off the list of absurdities is an astonishingly bad performance from John P. Ryan, who appears to have wandered onto the set thinking that this was an outright comedy. His General Taylor alternates between touch-feely, goofy and just plain deranged, and in another script he would be the bare-assed asylum escapee pretending to be a military man. Depending on the definition of entertainment, John P. Ryan as General Taylor is almost reason enough to watch Delta Force 2.

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Movie Review: Missing In Action 2: The Beginning (1985)

One of Cannon Films' cheaper efforts in a catalogue full of cheap movies, Missing In Action 2: The Beginning stumbles around in the jungle for 100 minutes, looking for reasons to portray the Vietnamese as increasingly evil torturers and the American captives as innocent victims. When Chuck Norris as Colonel Braddock decides that he has had enough, he kills everyone, blows up the place and moves on to the next mindless action movie.

The prequel to Missing In Action is a single-set, single-idea movie: Braddock and a group of other American prisoners of war are held for years at a Vietnamese prison camp ruled by the vicious commander Colonel Yin (Soon-Tek Oh). In a battle of wills deep in the jungle, Yin wants Braddock to admit that he committed war crimes, and Braddock will endure all sorts of suffering and not do so.

Spotting a helicopter re-supply plane as the opportunity to escape, Braddock finally wages a one-man war on the camp, eliminating all guards, forcing a final confrontation with Yin, and bundling the few surviving POWs onto the chopper for a flight to freedom.

The only positive aspect of Missing In Action 2: The Beginning is that it demonstrates admirable restraint: the all-out fire-fights, explosions, and mass killings are only unleashed in the final 25 minutes. The core of the movie is a deliberate ratcheting up of hate towards Colonel Yin and his guards. Yin enjoys torture, and subjects Braddock and his fellow prisoners to everything from fake Russian roulette to hanging them upside down by the ankles (and as an added extra for Braddock, with a canvass bag tied around his head and occupied by a hungry rat).

The main question that remains unanswered, not that it really matters, is how Braddock remains so bulked-up and physically resilient after years of living on prison rations. The impossibilities of one man killing hundreds of guards, seemingly by being in several locations at once, and rigging the entire place with explosives without being noticed, are not questions that need to be raised for this category of film-making.

Filled with actors who never belonged on the large screen and directed by Lance Hool (previously an actor and usually a producer, but in this class of movies, you save money where you can), Missing In Action 2: The Beginning fully deserved to remain locked up in the jungle.

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Movie Review: The Delta Force (1986)

One of the more ambitious Cannon Film efforts, The Delta Force teams veteran Lee Marvin with expressionless Chuck Norris, throws a lot of once-famous names at the screen, and achieves some engagement by taking its time to develop a story and a dose of drama prior to the machine guns opening up. But once the shooting starts, it quickly disintegrates into the mind-numbing excesses that made most Golan - Globus productions infamously bad.

Two terrorists led by Abdul Rifi (Robert Forster) hijack an American Travelways flight from Athens. The plane is diverted to Lebanon, where terrorist reinforcements arrive to bolster the hijackers. The Jewish passengers (including Martin Balsam and Joey Bishop) are taken off the plane and held captive in Beirut prison cells. Also on board are three US Navy sailors who are singled out for rough treatment, with one eventually killed. Throughout, flight attendant Ingrid (Hanna Schygulla) does her best to calm the tense situation and avoid further violence. After some traipsing across the Middle East, the plane returns to Lebanon and all the hostages are taken off the aircraft and stashed in a Beirut terrorist stronghold.

The elite counter-terrorist Delta Force, under the command of Colonel Alexander (Marvin) and Major McCoy (Norris) is dispatched to mount a rescue. Alexander and McCoy were part of the shambolic 1980 operation that spectacularly failed in an attempt to extract the American embassy hostages in Iran. Determined to make amends, the Delta Force launches a daring mission within Beirut to rescue the hostages and retrieve the hijacked plane.

Inspired by the true 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner (the real Delta Force was readied but not deployed), The Delta Force may have represented the peak of achievement for Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Directed by Golan, it was the first major Cannon production filmed at the GG Israel Studios in Jerusalem, and it also turned out to be the only high profile film to make use of the facility before the company collapsed. Shelley Winters, George Kennedy, Robert Vaughn, Bo Svenson, and Susan Strasberg are among the once somewhat famous actors who get smallish parts in The Delta Force, and despite triggering a game of spot the has-been, they collectively add interest to the film.

The movie does exhibit an increased level of professionalism and care. Scenes and characters are given appropriate time to breathe and develop, and the earlier part of the hijacking saga hits some promising notes in building the on-board tension between assailants and victims. But the final third of the film retreats to the Neanderthal cave where most of Cannon's action films dwell. Norris' McCoy character in particular contributes to an elevated amount of nonsense, killing hordes of terrorists on a motorcycle filled with an endless supply of lethal rockets, and an uncanny ability to never miss a single target.

But saddest of all is Lee Marvin's frail appearance in The Delta Force. In his farewell performance, he undoubtedly elevates the movie with an injection of distinguished talent and sheer presence. But he is also undeniably fragile and too old for the role, going through the motions in almost visible discomfort.

The Delta Force is not without its point of interest, but the production's limited tool set confines the experience to the cramped economy class, near the dank rear of the plane.

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Movie Review: Missing In Action (1984)

A brain-free Vietnam war revenge fantasy, Missing In Action exemplified what Cannon Films was mostly about: C-level action movies for non-discerning audiences, filled with heavy weaponry, explosions, chases, macho posturing and dead bodies.

A US government delegation travels to Vietnam to discuss the issues of soldiers still listed as missing in action. Colonel James Braddock (Chuck Norris) is a last minute addition to the delegation - he was held by the Vietnamese during the war and accused of killing civilians before escaping his captors. Braddock is not interested in meetings and negotiations. He sets off in his own, skulking around Ho Chi Minh City to uncover clues about the location of a prison camp where Americans are still being held.

Braddock travels to Thailand and connects with Tuck (M. Emmet Walsh), another war veteran with access to weapons and equipment. Together, Braddock and Tuck launch an amphibious assault in an attempt to free the MIAs and embarrass the Vietnamese.

Rushed into production and release to beat Rambo: First Blood Part II into the theatres, and apparently based on early treatments of the same script, Missing in Action succeeds in elevating Sylvester Stallone's bloodfest into classic status. Chuck Norris cruises through the movie with an exasperating non-expressive face, surviving numerous attempts on his life and dispatching all-comers with a minimum of effort and a maximum of noise. All the Vietnamese are evil, all the American politicians are morons, and only Braddock understands what is wrong and right. The pervasive rah-rah kill'em all attitude is plain nauseating.

Typical of productions from the Golan - Globus stable, the production values are choppy, and the supporting performances straight from the dossier of lost careers. The only woman in the cast is Lenore Kasdorf, a stalwart of the daytime television soap opera scene. Director Joseph Zito hustles the action along with the sole purpose of canning every scene at the lowest possible cost while capturing the highest number of stuntmen flying through the air to their cinematic death. One of the stuntmen was none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme, doubtless taking notes on the finer production points of mindless action movies.

Missing In Action was supposed to be the second film in the series, but was released first after the original story of Braddock's captivity and escape proved to be a weaker movie (as difficult as that is to imagine). The sequel become the launch of the franchise, and the supposed first instalment was relegated to prequel status.

Missing In Action established Norris as a second-tier bankable movie star within the second-tier category of indestructible all-action patriotic heroes, proving that those willing to travel deep enough down the leagues will eventually find a zone of comfort.

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