The Delta Force (1986)
Starring:
Chuck Norris, Lee Marvin, Martin Balsam, Joey Bishop, Robert Forster, Lainie
Kazan, George Kennedy, Hanna Schygulla, Susan Strasberg, Debra Levine, Bo
Svenson, Robert Vaughn, Shelley Winters, William Wallace, Charles Grant, Steve
James, Kim Delaney
Director:
Menahem Golan
Action Director: Don Pike
On November 4, 1979, hundreds of Iranian
student revolutionaries in Tehran stormed the American embassy in Tehran,
taking 52 hostages. They were motivated primarily by then-President Carter’s
allowing their former ruler, the Shah of Iran, to be transferred to the United
States for cancer treatment. Although the Shah had been an American ally for
decades, he was not a particularly popular leader with his own people and, like
many far-right dictators that the Americans supported during the Cold War, was
never above using his CIA-trained secret police to “purge” dissidents. With the
blessing of their new leader, the Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini,
the students broke into the embassy and started taking hostages[1]
once it became clear that the guards would not respond with deadly force.
A notoriously-failed military engagement
was put into action to free the hostages in April 1980. Eight military
helicopters were mobilized along with a Hercules transport aircraft which would
get the hostages out of dodge. Unfortunately, two helicopters were damaged
during a sandstorm and a third helicopter crashed into a tanker aircraft, resulting
in the deaths of eight soldiers. This is the context in which The Delta
Force begins, with one of the helicopters blowing up in the Iranian desert
and the Delta Force being ordered to abort. Although they successfully make it
out of Iran, they almost lose one of their number and Captain Scott McCoy
(Chuck Norris) is almost left behind trying to rescue on of his men. In a huff
over the government’s handling of the entire operation, Scott decides to retire
from the Delta Force.
Six years later, an airplane flight from
Athens to New York City (via Rome) is hijacked by a pair of Lebanese
terrorists, Abdul Rafai (Robert Forster, of Alligator and Jackie
Brown) and Mustafa (David Menahem). They initially force all the passengers
into the coach class seatings, but upon discovering that there are Israeli/Jewish
passengers aboard, they start separating the passengers. In a very emotional
moment that would remind 80s audiences of the Holocaust, a German flight
attendant (Hanna Schygulla, of The Marriage of Maria Braun and Poor
Things) is forced to go through the passengers’ passports and look for
Jewish names.
At the moment of the hijack, the pilot
was able to push some button that sent out a “hijack alarm,” so the American
embassy in Athens is quickly alerted to the situation. It doesn’t take long for
the news to reach Washington, and General Woodbridge (Robert Vaughn, best known
as “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”) orders Nick Alexander (Lee Marvin, of Emperor
of the North and The Comancheros) to get his Delta Force team
together. Although Scott McCoy has retired, his watching the news report of the
hijack awakens something in him and he drives to their base of operations in
order to join the team.
The plane lands briefly in Beirut in
order to unload the Jewish hostages (plus two American servicemen and a
Catholic priest, played by The Naked Gun’s George Kennedy) and pick up
some more terrorists. The plane then heads for Algiers, where the Delta Force
lands in order to engage them and eliminate them. Although the terrorists
release the women and children in Algiers, they plan on taking the men back
with them to Beirut. The Delta Force’s plan to storm the aircraft is aborted at
the last moment after Nick interrogates Ingrid and discovers that there are
more than just two terrorists on the plane. They regroup to fly to Israel and
sneak into Lebanon to find the terrorists’ base. They are assisted by a member
of the Mossad posing as an Eastern Orthodox priest (Shaike Ophir), whose church
happens to be located right next to the school where the male hostages—except the
Jews and American soldiers—are being held. But Abdul Rafai is a paranoid guy and
he wonders just how neutral that priest is...
Second history lesson: On June 14th,
1985, TWA flight 847 from Athens to Los Angeles was hijacked by Lebanese
terrorists en route to Rome. The terrorists, today associated with the Hezbollah
terror group, demanded the release of some 700 prisoners in Israeli custody.
They had passengers with Jewish names separated from the rest of the
passengers; killed an American Navy diver; and kept forty hostages inside
Beirut until President Ronald Reagan and Lebanese officials were able to
negotiate their release, which occurred at a schoolyard. The entire ordeal
lasted 16 days.
The Delta Force is essentially a retelling of the TWA flight 847 hijacking, but
from the imagination of Chuck Norris. Norris felt that the U.S. government
could have acted in a way that would have neutralized the threat without
acquiescing to any of their demands. The story follows the events of the hijacking
closely, from the murder of the American Navy diver to the movement of the
plane from Athens to Beirut to Algiers and back. Thus, The Delta Force presents viewers with alternate version
of history, much like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Inglorious
Basterds, in which the good guys win in the best way possible.
It is generally considered one of Chuck
Norris’s best movies from a film critic perspective. It doesn’t require Norris
to act, and that heavy lifting is left to the myriad of character actors who
play the passengers and Robert Forster in a “that’s him!?” performance.
In fact, the Delta Force spends much of the first half of the film in the
background, with the attention given to the events transpiring on the hijacked
plane. It has the effect of making The Delta Force feel like two
different films: the first half feel like one of those 1970s Airport movies,
complete with a role for George Kennedy. The second half feels like your more
typical Canon right-wing action epic, complete with Uzis, bazookas, and
motorcycles that fire missiles from both ends!
The problem with this approach is that
the film ends up feeling a lot longer than it actually is. By the time
we get to the Delta Force getting ready for action in Beirut, I was thinking, “Okay,
we’ll have a big 10-minute set piece and will wrap it up.” Nope. The “human
portion” of the movie that I thought took up about 100 minutes of screen
time actually only took up maybe an hour or so. Thus, because of the very
slow first half, a movie that is slightly longer than two hours feels closer to
two and a half.
Because of that, I was rather surprised
when we got not one, but four different action sequences in Beirut. The
first is an extended car chase through the streets of the city as Chuck and one
of his men are fleeing from the terrorists. Then you have the siege of the
school where the male hostages are being kept, which is a bit longer. That is
followed by the Delta Force ambushing Abdul Rafai’s caravan as they try to flee
Beirut to Syria with the Jewish hostages. And finally, there’s the assault on
the airport as Nick Alexander and his team take out the remaining terrorists and
try to get the rescued hostages to safety (in Israel). Chuck Norris’s martial
arts skills are kept to a minimum here, mainly used when he’s fighting a militant
driving a truck full of hostages and then when he beats the living snot out of
Robert Forster a few minutes later. But that fight is predictably one
sided, although I imagine most 80s audiences found it cathartic.
Although the action antics of the last
act go a little over the top, The Delta Force feels far more realistic
in its execution than Invasion U.S.A. did. Director Menahem Golan, one
of the two brains behind Canon, does a surprisingly good job at directing (he
usually just produced) and making the film feel grounded. He does get some nice
emotion out of the passengers during the first half of the movie. I just wish
the script would’ve given the Delta Force more to do in that first half to keep
the pace a little livelier.
[1] - Several diplomats managed to flee to the British Embassy and were
eventually smuggled out of the country under the pretext that they were part of
a film crew. This incident was dramatized in Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012).
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