My Military Valentine

The Delta Force

Directed by Menahem Golan

At the USA Beacon Hill and the USA Charles

Warning: The following movie may insult your positive IQ so severely that the result could well be permanent brain damage. Watch at your own risk. If you pay money to see this film, I will feel sorry for you.

HAVE YOU EVER found a movie so offensive that your shocked mind didn't know where to begin criticizing it? For me, Delta Force was one of those films. I've seen Chuck Norris before and although his performances were never spectacular, they were at least exciting and interesting. I watched him dodge machine gun fire and crack some skulls, and thought "This guy is good!" But when I saw him take on the entire city of Beirut and win, I could only think "This guy is stupid and amazingly lucky!"

Even the first half of the movie is offensively bad, although I can't figure out precisely why. After all, the first half-hour is simply a reenactment of the TWA terrorist hijacking this past June. Having followed those events fairly closely, I didn't find the dramatization either surprising or suspenseful. When director Menahem Golan showed a clip of the pilot (Bo Svenson) being interviewed by reporters, he froze the footage to make certain that the audience would notice that this was the same image that had appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek during the actual hijacking.

The insertion of a subplot focusing on a Jewish couple who had been held in a Nazi concentration camp during the second world war was just too much to take. The airline stewardess, Ingrid (Hanna Schygulla), is asked by the hijackers to select Jewish-sounding names from the collection of passenger's passports. She refuses, saying, "Don't you know I'm German...I won't do it again!" The director goes on to demonstrate that he is aiming at the lowest common denominator of human intelligence when he shows us a close-up of a Jewish passenger's tatooed forearm--a grim reminder of his days in the concentration camp--as he sheepishly hands his passport over to the unwilling Ingrid.

The only conceivable purpose behind all this ridiculous symbolism is to convince the audience that these terrorists are lower on the evolutionary chart than were the Nazis. They are in fact so subhuman that we aren't supposed to care when we see the Americans slaughter hundreds of Muslims later on in the film. But this doesn't explain why screenwriters James Bruner and Golan choose to inform us that one of the terrorists had a young daughter who was killed by the Israelis. Are they Nazis or victims or both? To be honest, I haven't lost too much sleep trying to figure out the answer.

ACTUALLY, THERE IS one other possibility for this Holocaust garbage: the makers of the Delta Force included the symbolism to make the first half of the movie as bogus as possible. If this was the goal, they succeeded. It was certainly the most over-acted piece of modern film I have ever seen.

But if the first half of the film was dull and ludicrous, it was a party compared to the second half. Instead of having diplomats work out a peaceful settlement of the hijacking crisis, as was actually the case, the Delta Force is called in. This group of "real" Americans is given the go-ahead to invade Beirut, to free the hostages, and then to escape in the hijacked 747. The possibility of failure is never even considered.

Even if we place our intelligence in the deepest portion of our brain, the Delta Force's antics don't make the grade. The Force's victories just aren't exciting, and their gruesomeness is unappealing. Even big Chuck Norris fails to live up to the fight scenes. In fact, unlike in his earlier films, he hardly ever uses his incredible physical strength or fighting ability in hand-to-hand combat. Instead, we see him use superior American weaponry and sheer bravado to defeat the enemy. (By the way, Norris is also presented as a master strategist and a speaker of French and Arabic, if you can swallow that.)

I guess if I were forced to describe the movie in one word, I'd have to use cheap. The plot can be summarized in one sentence. The action is forgettable. In order to make this empty package appealing to the film consumer, Delta Force tries to play upon the basest of human emotions: revenge. Tired of being kicked around by nasty terrorists, Americans can finally see their boys fight back. As such, the film is nothing but an inferior version of Rambo II, in which our frustration about the Vietnam War was used and abused. But even Sylvester Stallone was able to come up with a remotely realistic story in which to insert the film's blind, patriotic manipulations.

I don't think that I'm taking this movie too seriously. After all, the makers of Delta Force picked an actual event and then selected an Amercian reaction to it which they felt was more appropriate than the actual reaction. I was forced to decide whether this reaction was actually superior. The success of an actual Delta Force raid on Beirut was so slim as to be ridiculous. The penalty for failure was also too great. If anything, Delta Force is a demonstration of how dangerous such rash, jingoistic actions can be. Of course, it is also a demonstration of how low the movie industry can sink.