Chuck Norris stars as the adopted son of a Jewish casino owner (!) living in
Forced Vengeance was directed by James Fargo, a guy who directed a bunch of Clint Eastwood movies. It's a thoroughly middle-of-the-road Chuck flick and has far too many lapses in between the action to be completely worthwhile. My main problem with the film is that I never fully bought into Chuck's "vengeance". I mean the people he's avenging aren't even blood-related. Also, we have to take for granted that the bad guy's henchman actually raped his girlfriend because the rape scene is so awkwardly filmed that it's hard to tell just what he's doing to her. For all we know, Chuck is just out to avenge the ripping of a $7 blouse from Fashion Bug.
Which brings me to another point. Why is the movie called "Forced" Vengeance? I mean, it's not like somebody is twisting Chuck's arm and "forcing" him to get revenge. In fact, he seems pretty ready and willing to karate kick anyone who even remotely looks at him funny. Half Star deduction for the stupid title.
Speaking of karate kicking, Forced Vengeance does at least feature a couple of pretty good Kung Fu sequences. I particularly liked the part where a stooge stepped on Chuck's "best" cowboy hat and that made Chuck REAL mad. The ending is kinda weak as the main gangster just inadvertently hangs himself while falling off a yacht and Chuck just more or less scolds an old dude in a wheelchair. At least the scene where some window pane falls into the henchman's neck was pretty sweet. This flick also starts out with a great title sequence where a black silhouetted Chuck Norris gives a woman his cowboy hat and then proceeds to kick the snot out of a ninja in front of some Chinese neon. For whatever reason, this scene is repeated again later in the movie. I suppose this was the filmmakers' way of giving everybody a bathroom break.
Chuck gives one of his better performances in this one. Forced Vengeance may not be one of his best movies, but he's fun to watch and looks a lot more comfortable in front of the camera here than say, Good Guys Wear Black. Aside from the Kung Fuing and karate chopping, he's also given a slew of flashbacks to relate and even gets to essay a lot of Dragnet style narration too. Chuck returned the next year in Lone Wolf McQuade.
Chuck Norris stars in this tepid action flick that doesn't do a good job at showcasing his strengths; namely Kung Fuing the Hell out of people. After a cool title sequence, we see Chuck's platoon getting ambushed in
Ted (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) Post's flat direction looks more in tune with a TV movie or something than an honest to goodness chopsocky flick. Most of the action scenes suffer from a really cheap look (especially the
You can get a couple laughs from some of the film's glaring ineptness. Like the opening titles that proudly proclaim, "Chuck Norris IS John T. Booker!" Like the filmmakers meant for this to be the first in a series or something. Also there's a great scene at an airport where Chuck's mystery assailant's identity is painfully obvious to everyone BUT Chuck. (The dude just has on a wig and phony beard.) There is one amazingly ludicrous scene that just has to be seen to be believed though. It comes when Chuck drop kicks a guy through the windshield of a speeding car. If the flick had two or three more inspired scenes of carefree nuttiness, it might've been worthwhile.
Chuck naturally gets the best line in this one when he says, "Everything went wrong by the numbers... and that takes planning!"
AKA: Black Fighter.
Chuck Norris stars as a
Directed by Andrew (The Fugitive)
All these extraneous shenanigans don’t leave Chuck a whole lot of time to dish out the whoop ass. When he finally does, it’s too little too late. (You have to wait a good hour until old Chuck starts roundhousing Mexicans.) Since Chuck’s considerable kung fu skills are kept to a disappointing minimum, it knocks Code of Silence a notch or two below the usual Norris fare. Not even the scene where Chuck partners up with a prototype police robot (it looks like a cross between a Hummer and ED-209) makes the grade.
One of Chuck’s cop buddies gets the best line of the movie when he says, “You know what a Mexican and a cue ball have in common? The harder you hit them, the better their English gets!”
Chuck Norris stars as J.J. McQuade, a Texas Ranger who doesn’t play by the rules. His captain (R.G. Armstrong) doesn’t like the bad press he gets when he submachine guns a bunch of horse thieves and saddles him with a wet behind the ears rookie partner (Robert Beltran from Night of the Comet).
Just so you know, McQuade’s the kind of guy who lives out in the desert in a dilapidated trailer and spends his days blowing away scarecrows for target practice.
After a skeevy arms dealer played by David (Kill Bill) Carradine doesn’t like it when McQuade starts making time with his woman (Barbara Carrera), he has McQuade’s daughter (Dana Kimmel from Friday the 13th Part 3) almost killed. That makes McQuade mad and he starts gunning down dozens of Carradine’s underlings, but not so mad that he doesn’t have time to make out with Carrera some more. But then Carradine mows down his former captain (L.Q. Jones) and that gets McQuade REAL mad so he retaliates by machine gunning MORE of Carradine’s underlings. Carradine gets fed up so he knocks McQuade unconscious, stashes him in his truck, and buries them both in an unmarked grave. Luckily, McQuade comes to, downs a beer, hits the accelerator and he and his truck RISE FROM THE GRAVE!
Brilliant.
McQuade spends the rest of the movie healing up so he can go toe to toe with Carradine for the big showdown in which McQuade hops in a bulldozer and battles Carradine’s Army Jeep.
The film more or less plays like your average updated Spaghetti Western (the music is mock Ennio Morricone) except it features Norris rising from the grave in his trusty truck, Uzis, kung fu, and video game playing paraplegic midget gun runners. It’s also quite a thrill seeing two titans of martial arts cinema squaring off as Big Chuck trades knuckles with Caine from Kung Fu.
Too bad a lot of the movie is utterly stupid.
Like the final scene. It’s hilarious. Carrera jumps in the way of Carradine’s bullet, which is intended for Norris. Carradine then gives her just enough time to deliver her impassioned deathbed proclamation of love to Norris before reloading. Of course Old Chuck gets REALLY mad and when Carradine finally fires the rest of the clip, it of course comes nowhere near hitting him, giving Chuck the opportunity to blow him up with a grenade.
But Lone Wolf McQuade has a tender side too. Take for instance the scene where Carrera moves in with McQuade and starts vacuuming the floor, makes him take vitamins and worse, THROWS OUT HIS BEER. But Chuck’s such a wimp in this movie he actually CONSENTS to this de-masculinization and even makes love to her in the mud while opera music plays! Not logical. Half star deduction for that.
The stellar supporting cast includes
Speaking of great dialogue, Carradine gets to say a lot of slimy things like “Trust is the most important thing in our business.” But it’s Big Chuck who gets the movie’s best line when he says: “Super-charge THIS!”
Chuck basically recycled this concept for his ever popular
In 1984, teenagers Charlie Sheen and Patrick Swayze fended off a Communist takeover of
The difference is that Red Dawn was an intense action film that depicted the Communist invasion of
The plot has the scaly faced Richard (Sword and the Sorcerer) Lynch heading up a multi-national group of Communist terrorists who invade
The government wants Chuck to help blow away Commie scum but he’s too busy riding his air boat around the
Even though Chuck saves a church and a school bus from being blown up, he still takes time to mourn the dozens who get massacred at a nearby carnival.
“For every one I stop, a hundred succeed.”
Maybe the government’s problem was sending in ONE guy to fight off hundreds of terrorists, instead of sending in, say… the Army.
Actually the biggest problem with the movie is that the terrorist’s “plan” is thoroughly incomprehensible. I mean they just show up arbitrarily in the south, killing people at random, hoping that the country will slowly throw itself into chaos. They are so sloppily organized that we never really understand what their intended goal IS, except for maybe general anarchy and an excuse for Big Chuck to earn a paycheck for Cannon Pictures.
Speaking of Big Chuck, he doesn’t express a single emotion in this flick, but that’s okay though because he lets his automatic weapons do all the talking. Sadly, he never really gets a chance to use his patented kung fu skills much though.
This movie severely suffers from Get On With It Syndrome. If you’ve ever watched an action or horror movie, you’re aware of Get On With It Syndrome. You know how every action or horror movie ever made always starts with a bang, then there’s that draggy section where not much happens except for “character development” and the laborious set-up of the “plot”? You just sit there, munching on popcorn saying to yourself “Get on with it! Show me some action!” Well Invasion USA’s “G.O.W.I.e.S” takes up more than HALF the movie before Chuck reluctantly steps into action and Uzis a bunch of Commies to death. The fact that the movie’s running time is 107 minutes, approximately 27 minutes longer than it really needed to be, doesn’t help any.
There’s also a gratuitous female reporter character who says things like “Didn’t you bastards ever hear of the First Amendment?” and “Where did you learn to drive, cowboy?” who adds greatly to the movie’s G.O.W.I.e.S.
That’s not to say that this movie is a complete waste of time. There’s a great pre-G.O.W.I.e.S scene where Richard Lynch grabs a woman snorting cocaine by the back of the head and shoves her coke straw up her nose before shooting Billy Drago in the balls. TWICE. The movie also contains the best car chase through a shopping mall scene since The Blues Brothers and ends with the world’s only High Noon style quick draw shoot-out with rocket launchers, so that’s at least worth SOMETHING.
The director Joseph Zito, who also directed Chuck in Missing in Action as well as Friday the 13th Part 4, does a good job with the action, but if he had hired a better editor to trim this baby down, Invasion USA could’ve been a classic.
Even though Chuck only says about 47 words throughout the whole movie, he does at least get one memorable line: “I’m going to hit you with so many rights; you’re going to beg for a left!”
The flick (directed by Lance Hool) is more leisurely paced than it’s predecessor (one of the obvious reasons why it was released afterwards), but it does have some memorable torture scenes. The part when Oh tortures Norris is a classic. He hangs him upside down and places a burlap bag containing a hungry rat over his head and Chuck nonchalantly bites that motherfucking rodent’s head off! Sheer brilliance.
Sadly the rest of the film isn’t nearly as great as that scene (although Oh follows it up by breaking the neck of a soldier’s pet rooster). The main problem is that Norris is locked up for most of the movie and doesn’t get much of a chance to kick any ass until the last half hour. Steven (Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday) Williams co-stars as a sniveling soldier who kisses Oh’s ass. Norris followed this up three years later with Braddock: Missing in Action 3.
Norris is very good in the role of Braddock and is as at home blowing people away with an assault rifle as he is karate chopping them. During the course of the movie Chuck blows away nearly 100 people, blows up 8 grass huts and survives not one but TWO rocket launchers at close range. M. Emmet Walsh is pretty funny as Chuck’s rotund sidekick who opts to wear garish Hawaiian shirts instead of camouflage.
Director Joseph (Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter) Zito films the carnage at a brisk pace and keeps the scenes that don’t involve Chuck kicking ass moving at a decent enough clip. (He would later go on to direct Invasion U.S.A for Norris.) Missing in Action proved to be Norris’ big crossover hit and showed that he could be not only a kung fu star, but a bona fide action star as well. Chuck’s brother Aaron served as stunt coordinator and none other than Jean Claude Van Damme was a stuntman.
This was filmed back to back with Part 2 and was supposed to be the sequel, but Cannon films (ran by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus) released this one first.
Cannon Films released this puppy in the 1990 when their “stranglehold” on the 80’s action market was slowly dissipating. Cannon founding fathers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus had split up at this point due to the fact that they couldn’t agree which Lambada movie to make, so only Globus produced this one all by himself and Chuck was able to convince longtime collaborator and brother, Aaron Norris to direct it.
The plot is more or less the same as the James Bond flick Licence to Kill from the previous year.
The flick opens up at a masquerade party in Rio where an American team of agents gets gunned down by the ruthless pony tailed South American drug dealer, Billy Drago, a man so evil that he doesn’t even bother with a Latino accent. He even goes so far as to kill the husband and newborn babies of migrant worker women who don’t pick cocoa leaves quick enough. Chuck doesn’t cotton to Drago’s drugs putting a “stranglehold” (God I love that word) on our nation’s youth, so he throws him out of an airplane and skydives him to justice. Of course, the courts let Drago go free and he kills Chuck’s partner and his pregnant wife, so Chuck has to gear up the Delta Force (sans Lee Marvin) to go kick some ass. His crazy as an outhouse rat superior John P. (Death Wish 4) Ryan also tags along to blow away the drug dealing scum-suckers.
Chuck gets some tight fight scenes in the flick, including the part when he kung fus the shit out of punk rockers in a Chinese restaurant, the scene where he beats the ever loving shit out of his team for practice, and the part when Chuck gives an oily henchman fighting “lessons”. “School’s out!” The action sequences are up to snuff, and the skydiving scenes are excellent but the obvious parachute hidden under Drago’s clothes kinda ruin the effect.
While the film has a strong first 45 minutes it becomes increasingly doughy as it goes along. Norris (Aaron that is) also relies too much on excessive slow motion during the fight scenes that hurt their momentum and lessen their impact. At least there’s a good bulletproof limo vs. helicopter chase scene that livens up the proceedings.
Although the film ditches the “team” aspect that made the original work so well (Chuck is more or less the lone wolf Rambo type hero in this one), the action scenes and some priceless dialogue puts this flick a notch or two above the usual Chuck fare. Drago is excellent as the villain and is at his slimiest and despicable best, but it’s Chuck who gets the best line: “You’re nothing but a chicken shit weasel who thrives on the misery of others. And when death calls, you’ll be screaming like a baby!”
5 crewmembers died in a helicopter crash during the making of this movie.
AKA: The Delta Force 2: The Columbian Connection.
Viewing the film in the post 9/11 era, it plays even better than it did in the 80’s. The hijack scenes have a better sense of urgency giving the subsequent rescue of the hostages a more satisfying payoff. But I’m taking this way too seriously. We’re not talking United 93 here. The heart The Delta Force is just an entertaining action movie. Bottom Line: Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin kick terrorist ass for two hours and all is right with the world. Who could ask for anything more? Followed by a sequel and several unrelated spin-offs.
Braddock follows the basic outline of the first two Missing in Actions (1. Chuck goes to Vietnam. 2. Chuck gets captured. 3. Chuck gets tortured. 4. Chuck escapes. 5. Chuck gets pissed. 6. Chuck blows away half the country of Vietnam.) but it unfortunately suffers from Beyond Thunderdome syndrome because most of the movie consists of Chuck babysitting a bunch of snot nosed orphans.
This time Chuck goes to Vietnam because he finds out that his wife didn’t really die during the fall of Saigon. (The body Chuck saw was just some bimbo who stole her fancy bracelet that Chuck gave to her.) What really honestly pissed me off about this scene 20 minutes into the movie wasn’t that Chuck was too stupid to get a real ID on the charred corpse he thought was his wife, it was the fact that Chuck was up and walking around Saigon in 1975. You see we learned in Missing in Action 2: The Beginning that Chuck got sent to a POW camp in 1972 and didn’t escape until the early 80’s, so what the fuck is he doing running around knocking women up in Saigon in 1975? I couldn’t wrap my noggin around such a blatant continuity error that I automatically deducted one full star for the stupid screenwriting.
Anyway, some crazy priest tells him 13 years later that his wife is really alive and he has a 12 year old son, so Chuck calls up his amazingly annoying Australian comic relief sidekick who gets him a shitload of guns and Chuck parachutes behind enemy lines to find his wife and kid. When he does track them down, she’s glad to see him but his whiny son is resentful of his papa. But before the family can get too dysfunctional, some evil Vietnam warlord finds out Chuck is in the country and wants to get revenge on him for causing so much damage in Missing in Action 1 and 2 so he blows off his wife’s head and tortures Chuck with a car battery in front of his son. Chuck eventually escapes and sends his son to hide in an orphanage, but the warlord guy finds the kid and rounds up all the orphans and kidnaps them. So Chuck has to get all decked out with a grenade launcher and proceeds to blow up the half of Vietnam that he forgot to blow up in the first two movies.
All this is well and fine, but what grinds the movie to a screeching halt is all the lovey dovey bullshit involving Braddock’s newfound family. The scenes with him and his kid reconnecting are sub Lifetime Channel dreck and the scene where Chuck and the kid blow away the bad guy together is groan inducing. It doesn’t help that the little brat’s voice is like nails on a chalkboard (he calls him “Braa-Dock!”).
The flick was directed by Chuck’s brother Aaron and he does a competent enough job on the action side of things (The highlight comes when Chuck blows up a slimy pedophile bad guy with a grenade launcher at close range.), but mostly it’s just Big Chuck running around gunning down dozens of extras. The film runs way too long at over 100 minutes, (15 more than it really needed to be) and offers nothing you haven’t seen before from Chuck. Let’s hope Chuck’s finally gotten everyone out of Vietnam that needs to be out. Maybe next time he can just send them a plane ticket out of the country and spare us another pathetic sequel.
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