THE DELTA FORCE - The Force is with you

I think that everyone can pretty much agree that war is a bad thing. It means a whole lot people getting killed, a ton of money wasted and just an all-around inconvenience for everyone involved - unless of course you're in America during the eighties. If Hollywood was any barometer to go by, in the eighties, the United States was into war like Soccer Moms were into Tickle Me Elmo at Christmas time.

Why did we love our fictional war so much in the eighties? Probably because the last war that the United States actually did any good in, where there was a clear winner against an unambiguously evil villain that posed an actual genuine threat, was World War II. Since then it's been an endless parade of pathetic and ineffectual wars where we just run in, stomp a developing nation into the dirt and run out again declaring victory before the indigenous population have a chance to know what the hell is going on.

Leading the charge of the Emulsion Print brigade was the Cannon Group and two successful Israeli producers named Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. On their watch this whole "War on Terror" thing would be much simpler. Oh, I mean sure - nowndays we have all kind of high tech resources at our command, with cruse missiles that can hit a bunker 600 miles away in Unspecifiedistan and satellites that can read a newspaper from orbit and secret CIA prisons in Cuba and all that - but what we really needed was just one thing: Chuck Norris. Being able to pop a patriot missile into an enemy tank from half a world away is all well and good, but when was the last time you saw one of them fancy high-tech missile clobber a bad guy with a roundhouse kick? Yeah - I didn&#146t think so.

Based vaguely on the real-life hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, the story opens in Athens Greece, at the airport as the flight back to New York is preparing to board, allowing us ample time to meet all our hostage cliches for the duration of the movie - the pregnant woman that could go into labor at any moment, the couple on their 50th wedding anniversary, the Irish priest and so on. If fact, if you're checking the scorecard, I was shocked to find that they didn&#146t have the "Little girl in need of a heart transplant and has to get to New York in the next 12 hours or she'll die" box ticked.

Meanwhile, amid all these happy travelers, we meet our terrorists for the movie. We know they are terrorists because they look vaguely Middle Eastern and all have beards. Nope - no racial profiling here! These chaps are from the evil militant organization called New World Revolutionary Organization (led by Robert Forster of all people) and of course are preparing to hijack the plane.

Once in control the plane, they go on to prove how EEEEE-vile they are by sorting out the Jews from the rest of the passengers (and they make the German stewardess do the sorting - how EEE-vile is that?) and demand that the flight be diverted to Beirut, and as terrorists often do, they intend to kill off passengers one at a time until they get what they want. Of course what they want is never actually made quite clear - beyond threatening our helpless God Fearing Americans with hand grenades and uzi machine guns in the name of Allah, that is.

Our only hope of restoring Freedom and Democracy (tm) to the world and bringing home our helpless God Fearing Americans: the DELTA FORCE. Lead by Chuck Norris and the second toughest man in Hollywood - Lee Marvin, the Pentagon deploys them to the field to do what they do best - infiltrate and track down Allah luvin terrorist groups just like this - and blow them away!

The movie holds back the action, building the "drama" in the early part of the movie until the last reel where Golan (who also co-wrote and directed Delta Force) suddenly turns the movie into a live action episode of G.I. Joe where the Bad Guys get theirs but good in a gloriously stupefying sequence that was so fundamentally illogical I wouldn&#146t have noticed if the Ayatollah Khomeini suddenly showed up riding a giant robotic spider,.

The acting is surprisingly decent, not a surprise considering the star studded list of B-Movie actors appearing throughout. In addition to Chuck and Lee, we get George Kennedy and Shelley Winters - never a good sign appearing together on an airplane - Robert Vaughn as a four-star general, Mazes and Monsters alum Susan Strasberg, Cannon Films favorite bit player Steve James, Martin "Mitchell!!" Balsam and Bo Svenson fresh from a stint on the Fall guy.

The problem is not the cast, but the script. Now, Big Dumb Action movies from Cannon are very often light in the plotting department, and I have no problem with that. However in Delta Force we've got too much action for a dramatic movie and too much drama for an action flick. It's nearly an hour into the film before we get to our first car chase and another thirty minutes after that before we get to our big climax. In a Big Dumb Loud action movie from the eighties, I should be subjected to Chuck delivering so many lefts that I'll be begging for a right every fifteen minutes or so. The amazingly long running time of 128 minutes wouldn&#146t be so bad if the flick gave us something to chew on - you know, meaningful character development or something. But all we get is a bunch of empty threats from obnoxious terrorists to generic hostages.

EXPLOSIONS: 62
CAR CHASES: 1
FRUIT CARTS DESTROYED: 1
BODY COUNT: 203
ROUNDS FIRED: 4,419
PUNCHES THROWN: 27 (and one roundhouse kick)
NINJA? No
BEST LINE: "Sleep tight, sucker."

THE DVD -
Sadly, Delta Force is presented in a full frame format - but I don't think it's pan and scan. As I understand it, most of the Cannon films in the eighties were shot open-matte format and cropped down to widescreen for release. So of course I'd prefer a widescreen anamorphic print, at least we're not losing any information from the sides.

As far as the condition of the print, it's fair but not outstanding. There are scratches and print damage in places, and it looks like the low budget 25 year old movie that it is.

I should also point out that it seems the DVD is missing the subtltle track. Normally this isn't a big deal, but I'm willing to bet that your typical Chuck Norris enthusiast hasn&#146t brushed up on his Arabic.

THE EXTRAS -
Typical of MGM's low budget DVD offerings, all we get here is the trailer.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
Shamelessly Jingoistic and schizophrenically inconsistent, Delta Force can't decide if it's a story of desperate people in a hopeless situation or a big and loud blowing things up real good story. In trying to please two masters, it ultimately serves none. If you're looking for a flick from an age when Terrorism was still fun, go get Invasion U.S.A. instead.