The Delta Force (1986)

Originally, The Delta Force, which is the name of the special forces commando unit tasked with dealing with combating international terrorists and hostage situations, was going to be a film featuring both Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson to star, with Joseph Zito, who made one of the Cannon Group’s most successful films at the box office, Missing in Action, as the director. Norris came up with the story idea after he became frustrated that the ineffective Ameican response to terrorism was making us a ‘paper tiger’ in the Middle East, feeling that it was only a matter of time that terrorism would surface in the free and open society of the United States if it wasn’t taken care of with force immediately.

For Norris, who signed on to the film for the healthy sum of $2 million, The Delta Force would mark the first time he would be in a film with an ensemble of respected Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated character actors. This was meant as a vehicle to cross him over from pure action movies to mainstream efforts, much like Clint Eastwood had done in the 1970s. However, there would prove to be a delay in the production for several months when unrest in the Middle East would kick up at the time, making filming in Israel risky. During this period, veteran actor Lee Marvin replaced Charles Bronson, who had begun working on another acting commitment he had made to appear in a movie for HBO called Act of Vengeance. (Delta Force leader Nick Alexander would end up being Marvin’s final film role.) Joseph Zito would also drop out, with producer and co-writer Menahem Golan stepping in himself into the director’s chair. Zito would get to do his own version of the film in 2000 in the unrelated Delta Force One, which co-stars the son of Chuck Norris, Mike, who also happened to be a co-star in 1991’s Delta Force 3 (playing a different character).

The opening sequence takes inspiration from the U.S. ordered military operation called Operation Eagle Claw (the mission involving the botched attempt by America’s Delta Force to rescue the 53 hostages from the American embassy in Tehran in 1980), putting much of the blame on decisions from government bureaucrats who know very little about tactical operations. The rest of the film is also based around a real-life event from June of 1985 with the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 (the name of the airline is changed to ATW, “American Travelways”, for the film), the first such hijacking to occur in the Middle East in fifteen years. Much of it is relatively faithful to the real-life events, with a terrorist group hijacking the airplane containing mostly Americans going from Athens to Rome, forcing it to land in an airport in Beirut. The Jewish passengers were separated from the rest, with help from a German flight attendant who reluctantly looked through the passports to determine which names were Jewish. The tragic fate of a U.S. Navy diver is also accurately portrayed.

However, this is Hollywood, and asses need to be kicked. In real life, the hostages were released by the terrorists over the course of a few weeks, after Israel complied with demands to release seven-hundred Shia prisoners. Most of the hijackers got away because they had scattered hostages to different places around Beirut, thwarting any form of concentrated rescue attempt. The Operation Eagle Claw beginning of the film was originally conceived of as the entire plot of the film. However, Cannon did not think it would sell without being uplifting, so they set about working on a Delta Force mission that Americans would cheer on. That included changing the end of the mission to one in which Delta Force would actually succeed in their mission.

The change toward an entirely fantasyland scenario caused the founder of the real Delta Force, Charles Alvin Beckwith, to walk away as a consultant to the film. Even so, in the end, they opted to portray Eagle Claw as a tragedy in a preamble to the hijacking story, to which the optimistic but fabricated action-packed ending would get placed. In addition to taking events from the 1985 hijacking of the TWA flight, Menahem Golan would also draw inspiration from a film he had done before, the Oscar-nominated 1977 film Operation Thunderbolt, based on an actual event from 1976 where Israeli commandos secure the release of Israeli hostages from a flight hijacked from Palestinian terrorists from an airport in Uganda.

This fictionalized film version delivers the typical “Hollywood therapy” for harrowing events of the melodrama that is depicted in the first half. The final hour imagines calling in the Americans in the form of Delta Force who proceeds to dismantle the operation and give the terrorists the kind of proper comeuppance that seems to only happen at the end of heroic and ultra-patriotic action movies. The film’s ending has all of the passengers singing, “America the Beautiful”, with all of them knowing the words to the song, despite only some of them being from the United States. From a wish-fulfillment standpoint, it’s the kind of film that seems to have been extracted from Ronald Reagan’s wettest of dreams.

Golan’s film is the result of having two notions of what the film should be. One half is the serious melodrama that occurs for the passengers of the ATW flight who now find themselves as hostages. While obviously still a bit stagy, these scenes provide a somber and grounded approach that seems incongruous with the second half of the film, in which the Delta Force proceeds to come in with guns ablaze, kicking ass and taking names, all accompanied by Alan Silvestri’s repetitive but admittedly catchy score meant to evoke pomp and patriotism (that score would later be used by ABC Sports on TV in the late 1980s and through most of the 1990s to introduce their broadcasts of the Indianapolis 500). The main thrust of their story is that Delta Force is full of elite soldiers that are not utilized to their effectiveness due to having to take orders from government bureaucrats. Once they are given the green light to do their thing, there is no other force on Earth capable of stopping them. While violent and played without humor, it is meant to get audiences amped and cheering but seems so out of place to the build-up as to be unintentionally humorous when viewed with any kind of objectivity.

The Delta Force is mostly devoid of any attempts for intentional jokes, save for an instance of Norris tossing out a James Bond-worthy one-liner during a kill as he shoots a terrorist hiding under a bed while telling him, “Sleep tight, sucker.” The James Bond influence would also extend into a few gadget-oriented weapons, including outfitting a motorcycle with a couple of front-facing rocket launchers and rear-facing grenade launchers, all triggered from the handlebars. It’s serious business the rest of the way, though not exactly grounded, as the Delta Force engages frequently into Hollywood action blockbuster antics that has them shooting up a lot of sets before blowing them up with reckless abandon.

Cannon would give the film a budget of $10 million and it would be the largest film made in Israel up to that point, featuring a crew of over 200 people and about a thousand extras employed.  Israel’s Ben Gurion airport being used for weeks to shoot the film. Golan would seek the assistance of the Israeli military and members of the United States Special Forces in order to lend some authenticity to the anti-terrorist procedures within the film, even though much of it does still strain credibility from an action extravaganza standpoint.

Delta Force was the second in a multi-picture deal between Chuck Norris and Cannon. Norris, while undoubtedly a skilled physical performer, seems out of place with his shaggier mane and beard to buy as a military man. He also is a bit bland as an actor, only really seeming to come to life when he gets to deliver a kick or two in a bad guy’s direction. Even then, he stands out so much from the others, it’s hard to consider him as part of an elite team rather than an individualistic super-soldier who just comes along for the ride. Norris would call the film a cathartic experience for him and felt that many in the audience would appreciate The Delta Force as a way to relieve the tension and anxiety they felt about the escalating threat of terrorism and the United States’ position in the world.

Lee Marvin fits in better as a seasoned leader of the team, but he was ailing at the time due to complications from a life of smoking and hard-drinking and couldn’t perform much in terms of action. He signed on to the film after a fifteen-minute pitch because Cannon was willing to give him the money up front, and it would get him out of the house and his mind off of his health issues. His role had been pared down after the departure of Bronson to the point where the veteran actor gets few chances to stand out. Marvin gets further eclipsed by the presence of Chuck Norris doing most of the fighting.

Further curious casting choices would see giving roles to some famous personalities. Putting in George Kennedy and Shelley Winters only hearkens back to the disaster movies of the 1970s, of which they were two of the most popular go-to actors. Unfortunately, such a Hollywood-ization of these kinds of events diffuses the tension with components that constantly remind us we’re watching a movie. Robert Forster as the main Lebanese terrorist is a bit of a headscratcher. He delivers a dedicated performance that never strays into something cartoonish, but he’s such a known presence that he never quite disappears into the role.

The Delta Force would garner some protests from the Arab-American community who accused Golan and the Cannon Group of making pro-Israel/anti-Arab propaganda and for further pushing forward harmful stereotypes. Golan would go on to claim that his film was not meant to be anti-Arab but anti-terrorist, and the terrorists just happen to be Arab. Along these lines, he does not write the terrorists as purely evil, as they are given moments when they exhibit a connection to their hostages (such as with a young girl) or for their religious faith, even if they specifically target the Jewish men. Despite Golan’s downplaying, the film does serve as subversive propaganda which has a strong theme that suggests that fighting Islamic terrorists is the duty for all red-blooded Americans and Christians (Kennedy’s Catholic priest character says he is Jewish, like Jesus) to practice. It also doesn’t give a clear voice to the nature of or reasons for the demands of the terrorists, relegating much of their motives toward just a hatred of Israel and the United States.

The Delta Force would prove to be a lucrative deal for Cannon, debuting at #3 at the U.S. box office, racking up $17 million domestically. Nevertheless, time hasn’t been as kind for the film, mostly of appeal today strictly to huge fans of Chuck Norris. It’s more than a bit dated by today’s standards, especially in the jingoistic portrayal of the Army’s special forces and its rah-rah attitude toward American might. Half of the movie was a “G.I. Joe” cartoon come to life. It’s the kind of movie that would be endlessly spoofed nowadays, especially by Team America: World Police and its “America, F— Yeah” attitude whenever you see the soldiers on the screen. In the 1980s, such films were commonplace, but they haven’t aged well due to the unabashed nature of trying to jazz audiences into pumping their fists to root for a wholly self-satisfying gratification of our desire to see an All-American hero like Chuck Norris kick the snot out of all of the evildoers of the world without breaking a sweat.

• Two sequels would result, with Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection in 1990, followed by the Chuck Norris-less Delta Force 3: The Killing Game in 1991. Prior to his passing, Menahem Golan in 2014 was in talks about a fourth film in the series.

Qwipster’s rating: C

MPAA Rated: PG-13 for strong violence and some language
Running Time: 125 min.

Cast: Chuck Norris, Lee Marvin, Robert Forster, George Kennedy, Martin Balsam, Joey Bishop, Lainie Kazan, Hanna Schygulla, Bo Svenson, Robert Vaughn, Shelley Winters, Steve James, William Wallace, Kim Delaney, Charles Grant
Director: Menahem Golan
Screenplay: James Bruner, Menahem Golan