Lee Marvin was one of the ultimate tough guys of the screen, but it rather sad to reflect upon his final film, The Delta Force. This patriotic, mind-numbing, unrealistic action flick is basically a wish-fulfilment fantasy the kind of film that teenage boys just love, but people who value diplomacy and sensitivity find embarrassing to watch. The main problem is that this is not Marvin's film, but instead yet another in the sequence of Chuck Norris vehicles from the '80s. Norris might have been a martial arts master, but he is not a master of acting
. and in this one his wooden performance, coupled with the effortless manner with which he disposes of Middle Eastern terrorists, drags the film down to the level of gung-ho trash.
A plane from Athens to New York is hijacked by terrorists led by the fanatical Abdul (Robert Forster). The plane is diverted to Beirut, where its passengers find themselves at the mercy of their captors. The hijackers are unsettled when they learn that some of the passengers are Jews, and separate those with Jewish-sounding names from the other travellers. Meanwhile, politicians race to find a diplomatic solution to the hijacking but seem unable to come up with the answers. Eventually it becomes apparent that there is no hope of the situation being solved peacefully, so an anti-terrorist team known as the Delta Force are brought in to liberate the captives. The Delta Force is led by Major Scott McCoy (Norris) and Colonel Nick Alexander (Marvin). Their mission is two-fold on one hand they must free those held on the plane, but they must also track down and rescue some other hostages who have been moved from the plane and are being held in secret locations around the city.
The first section of the film, in which the hijacking plot is covered, is quite intriguing. Some of it is a little overwrought, but at least the story progresses in a relatively believable, factual manner. When Norris and his Delta Force enter the story, things get significantly worse. The whole thing slips off into idiocy culminating in a supremely silly finale in which Chuck wipes out bad guys with a missile-loaded motorbike. The film is underscored with Alan Silvestri's monotonous and irritating music, and directed with competence but indelicacy by Menahem Golan (half of the Golan-Globus production team who financed this, and countless other, inferior action flicks for Cannon in the '80s). The political angle of the film is not really worth mentioning it doesn't do much for Middle Eastern-American relations, but the whole thing is so immature and simplistic that no-one could be seriously offended by it. Norris fans will probably like this, as they love to see their man kicking butt (and he does plenty of THAT in the film); Marvin fans will probably look on in disappointment as the man who redefined "tough" in films like Point Blank and The Dirty Dozen is reduced to cartoonish fantasy such as this.
A plane from Athens to New York is hijacked by terrorists led by the fanatical Abdul (Robert Forster). The plane is diverted to Beirut, where its passengers find themselves at the mercy of their captors. The hijackers are unsettled when they learn that some of the passengers are Jews, and separate those with Jewish-sounding names from the other travellers. Meanwhile, politicians race to find a diplomatic solution to the hijacking but seem unable to come up with the answers. Eventually it becomes apparent that there is no hope of the situation being solved peacefully, so an anti-terrorist team known as the Delta Force are brought in to liberate the captives. The Delta Force is led by Major Scott McCoy (Norris) and Colonel Nick Alexander (Marvin). Their mission is two-fold on one hand they must free those held on the plane, but they must also track down and rescue some other hostages who have been moved from the plane and are being held in secret locations around the city.
The first section of the film, in which the hijacking plot is covered, is quite intriguing. Some of it is a little overwrought, but at least the story progresses in a relatively believable, factual manner. When Norris and his Delta Force enter the story, things get significantly worse. The whole thing slips off into idiocy culminating in a supremely silly finale in which Chuck wipes out bad guys with a missile-loaded motorbike. The film is underscored with Alan Silvestri's monotonous and irritating music, and directed with competence but indelicacy by Menahem Golan (half of the Golan-Globus production team who financed this, and countless other, inferior action flicks for Cannon in the '80s). The political angle of the film is not really worth mentioning it doesn't do much for Middle Eastern-American relations, but the whole thing is so immature and simplistic that no-one could be seriously offended by it. Norris fans will probably like this, as they love to see their man kicking butt (and he does plenty of THAT in the film); Marvin fans will probably look on in disappointment as the man who redefined "tough" in films like Point Blank and The Dirty Dozen is reduced to cartoonish fantasy such as this.