The Delta Force (1986) – Israeli director/co-producer/co-writer Menahem Golan has given us two movies in one here.
One is a hijacking drama, inspired loosely a real-life hijacking in 1985, in which Islamic terrorists grab a plane after takeoff in Athens. Islamic terrorists are not known for their fondness of Jews, especially Israeli Jews, and so much of the tension comes from the hijackers’ eventual discovery of Israeli passengers on board and their segregation of the Jewish men (and three men in the U.S. Navy) for eventual offboarding in Beirut as added hostage guarantees. (Special props to George Kennedy as New York priest Father O’Malley, who volunteers to be included with the hostage Jewish men; basically, “Jesus was Jewish, so I’m one of them.”)
And in the second movie, Chuck Norris and the Delta Force blow things up to rescue them.
After moving from Israel to Hollywood, Menahem Golan was, of course, one half of Golan-Globus, the production team behind the action movie powerhouse Cannon Films which had made Chuck Norris a star. So here, Golan (with Yoram Globus as his co-producer) brings together both halves of his career in one movie, shot back in his old stomping grounds in Israel.
In contrast to the characterization and human drama in the first half, there’s practically nothing of the sort in the second half. Norris’ character is retired from the Delta Force but comes back for this mission, mainly so he can have a beard and longer hair than the military would countenance. That’s really it for characterization. The rest of it is righteous terrorist ass-kicking, to the tune of a diligently upbeat action theme by Alan Silvestri.
Radius (2017) – A smart little SF-tinged thriller: A man regains consciousness after a one-vehicle auto accident and discovers (a) he has complete amnesia, and (b) any living creature who comes within a certain distance of him drops dead.
All except for a woman who also has complete amnesia, who apparently was in the same accident. Now they need to figure out what happened to them, and how they’re related.
I like this kind of SF film; the premise is entirely (though logically) fantastic, without the need for any special effects for 99% of the running time (with the exception of the dying people’s eyes turning foggy, which is something that could have been dispensed with if the budget had been lower). I love space ships and ray guns as much as or more than the next person, but I also really appreciate movies where the premise is the most engaging part, and the story follows that premise logically but surprisingly.
And yes, the conclusion is a bit of a let-down; it often is when a compelling mystery is unraveled and explained. But that still leaves the movie as a whole solidly in the black.
Broken Arrow (1950) – Jimmy Stewart starts the Western phase of his career in this highly fictionalized story of Tom Jeffords, the man who brought Cochise to the bargaining table and brokered a peace between the Apaches and the white settlers (before the U.S. of A. screwed the Apaches over and started the Indian Wars again).
Holding the plot together is Jeffords’ romance with Sonseeahray (Debra Paget, who’s not only the least Native-American looking actress to ever play a Native American, but was also fifteen years old — a full TWENTY-SIX years younger than Stewart).
The story doesn’t have an ending so much as a stopping place, as they really didn’t have the time or inclination to go on into the screwing-over part of history; this was the first of a new crop of Westerns sympathetic to the Indians, but I can see that they didn’t want to go fully into the perfidy of the U.S. here — 1950, after all.
Abandoned movies:
Black Site (2018) – You know what goes well with a huge, ungainly lump of exposition? EVEN MORE exposition!
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