Reflecting on Chuck Norris films: Missing in Action

Chuck Norris is a legend to most people but in sort of a joking way. The meme culture surrounding the joke that he is the toughest person in the world and can do supernatural-strength sorts of things effortlessly is something that started somewhere and the world just kind of ran with it.

I participated in this sort of thing as well and god a real "kick" out of it too despite the fact that I wasn't really familiar with the man's work and had never seen an episode of Walker: Texas Ranger in my life.

When Chuck died earlier this month I was as surprised as anyone but then the person who runs our movie server uploaded nearly every Chuck Norris movie ever made. There are a lot of them and most of them were from his quite popular days back in the 80's. I decided to sit down and watch a couple of them because I realized that I have no recollection of ever seeing an entire Chuck Norris movie from start-to-finish.

I started with Missing in Action thinking that it must be pretty good seeing as how there are 3 of them.

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You can tell right from the start that this film didn't really have a huge budget. I mean, perhaps it did for the time period but it looks really terrible by today's standards which I suppose is ok considering the film is over 40 years old. I decided to look it up and found out that it cost $2.2 million to make, which is a pretty efficient use of money I guess when you consider the amount of vehicles and helicopters that are in the movie for starters.

The premise is completely ridiculous and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

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In the opening sequence we see Chuck (whose name is "Braddock" in the film) retreating from their position somewhere in Vietnam during the war. The helicopters choose to land in an area that is right next to a machine gun bunker controlled by the enemy because that it totally how military operations work. Nobody even bothers to try to take out the bunker instead, just like military procedure dictates, they all just try to outrun the bullets. Many of them fail and they lose a lot of guys and one helicopter just explodes because again, this is totally how these sorts of machines operate.

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Braddock returns home safely after being the only person in his unit that thinks it might be a good idea to take out the machine gun bunker, which he does easily by flanking it and throwing a single grenade at it. It's truly remarkable what a little bit of thinking outside the box can do for a soldier.

Years later, Braddock is called over to Vietnam to meet with the Vietnamese government so they can explain that they don't actually have any more prisoners of war. Braddock of course doesn't believe them, easily obtains evidence that they are lying and then sets about to rescue the prisoners all on his own. This entails going to Thailand (which I don't know if you are aware of this, is an entire country further west from Vietnam) where he easily obtains a boat and loads of weapons in a country where the population isn't really allowed to own guns.

He purchases this with US Dollars that we never see too because I guess they use those over there.

He gets these weapons at a bargain price too and sets off to rescue the POW's in a camp in Vietnam, which he sails to on a small boat even though the coastlines of the two countries are technically only 90km apart but the POW camp is meant to be in the north of Vietnam which would make this journey on the small boat perhaps a thousand kilometers

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It's a Chuck Norris movie so I shouldn't be looking for realism, I am aware of this. Unfortunately the film doesn't get much more realistic from this point forward as the camps are easily spotted and infiltrated and the guards are hapless buffoons who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a shotgun at point 10 meters.

While there is a bit of suspense (not really) when his boat gets blown up there is a hilarious scene where Braddock rises from the water and obliterates the enemies who are just yukking it up on a bridge with zero cover.

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Even though the world was a lot more sypathetic towards story lines back in 1984 when we didn't crank out any CGI at the time, this film was universally panned. Despite this, the film ended up making a ton of money (for the time) and lead to there being 2 sequels, neither of which I think I can bear to watch.

The movie ends extremely abruptly as Braddock simply barges into an international meeting between Vietnamese and US agents along with all of the POW's that "don't exist" coming along with him to the party. Then the credits roll.

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I don't mean to diss on Chuck, but this film is bloody awful. It doesn't make any sense at any point and the actions scenes look really cheap and fake all the way through the movie. Chuck, I"m sorry to say this Chuck, but the guy can't act either.

I think the only reason to watch this is to treat it as a comedy because it certainly is that. It embodies the rather absurd nature of 80's action films and the one-man-army plot-line that was used oh-so-frequently back in those days. First Blood came out in 1982 but seriously, if you watch that film it seems extremely plausible in comparison to this mess of a film.

I will likely watch other Chuck films just to try to understand what all the talk is about. I think I am discovering what I should have found obvious, that the badass fame that Chuck ended up with was all in jest and yes, I already knew that.

I can't with good faith recommend that anyone watch this movie though, it's pretty terrible and I was bored through most of it.