Missing in Action
Chuck Norris stars as Braddock, a special forces veteran who returns to Vietnam in order to rescue POW's still held by the vietcong. Arriving as part of an American delegation, the Vietnamese promptly try and frame him for war crimes so he skedaddles into the bush to go it alone. He does end up enlisting an old war buddy (M Emmet Walsh) to assist as he goes full Rambo and decides to win the war!
The best way to approach a film like Missing in action is the same way I approached London has fallen. Don't go looking for any deeper message or reliable political statement, switch of the reasoning part of your brain and just go with the over thee top action scenes of Chuck kicking ass. Like Rambo 2 it epitomises 80's action cinema. Both films shared the spurious notion that the communist Vietnamese kept hold of POW's after the end of the war. This notion came from the large number of Americans remaining unaccounted for. Why? Well there is no real logical explanation as to why they would keep hold of these prisoners, they were never used for any political purposes, exchanged for spy's. The more likely explanation is that the bodies were simply never recovered. Even today people stumble across human remains and relics from the war in the jungles and the death toll from unexploded munitions discovered is a source of public record.
However misguided its attempt at a message, its worth remembering that above all else films like missing in action are fun. Joseph Zito does a great job at directing and the film is a thrilling piece of nonsense that's worth watching. For my money its a better film than Rambo 2 as its not following on from a far better film (first blood).
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