Explosion Count: approx. 34
As part of our lead up to the recording and subsequent posting of our Expendables 2 episode, I'm taking one member of the cast each week and reviewing one of their films. This week I reviewed The Delta Force alone with my girlfriend Gen.
When I was a kid, Delta Force was fucking awesome. It's theme was only second to the theme from Star Wars in my head. And Chuck Norris had the best dirt bike ever!
Now time has lifted those rose coloured glasses have now been lifted and my view is a little more realistic.
The Gen Summation
"It's like they started to try and make a good movie then gave up and said fuck it, let's just blow shit up."
Can't really argue with my girlfriend. The Delta Force is about a squad of big time commandos who have been brought in due to a hickjacking. Terrorists from Beirut have taken a plane hostage and subsequently landed in their own country and taken all of the male hostages off, separating some military service men and possible Jews (including a Catholic priest who volunteers to be a hostage because he's a Jew just like Jesus was... I shit you not this was the explanation George Kennedy gives).
A good chunk of the film tries to be a serious hijacking drama.
It fails at this due to bad script and bad acting but it tries. Like the German stewardess who doesn't want to help seperate the possible Jewish passengers due to the fact that she is German and people just naturally associate German with the Nazis. To be fair, she's got a little bit of a point. Unfortunately, the poor actress that plays said stewardess is rather melodramatic.
And then somewhere around the middle of filming, someone remembered "Wait, we've got Lee Marvin and Chuck Norris in this thing" and they start blowing shit up.
Watching it as an adult I realized a few things.
This movie has a ton of lag time in between the crappy acting and Chuck Norris driving his awesome dirt bike around (the dirt bike did turn out to be pretty cool).
The other thing I discovered was how many celebs they crammed into bit parts. Shelly Winters, Joey Bishop, Bo Svenson.. okay so they're either older celebs or cult figures but still, I was really surprised at the amount of casting that was done.
Overall, not as good as I remembered.
Next week on The Road to The Expendables 2, Dolph!
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