Translate this Article...
REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long
Company: Nu Image
Runtime: 93 mins
Format: DVD
Plot: A team of military soldiers and a scientist go after a terrorist group that has seized a deadly virus and is threatening to release it upon populated areas.
Review: The plot for Operation Delta Force (a title trying to capitalize on the then-recent Chuck Norris-starring Delta Force) is a simple one we've seen dozens of times before, in dozens of other made-for-TV action movies - When Ernie Hudson fails to protect a deadly new manmade virus from being stolen by a rogue group of soldiers, Jeff Fahey's special ops Delta Squad is called in to work with him to retrieve the virus and kill the bad guys before they can unleash it upon the world. Of course, just like how things always go in movies such as this, Ernie Hudson and Jeff Fahey's characters have bad history between each other, which leads to lots of badly-scripted drama and unwillingness to work together.
This movie's only real strong suit is in the acting, which is to be expected with these great names attached. Jeff Fahey rocks the hell out of this movie, and Ernie Hudson always turns in a serviceable and entertaining performance. The real surprise though is that even the less main and background characters pull off some decent to good performances, and all the characters on the main Delta Squad team have pretty good chemistry with one another.
However all the action is horribly shot, and in the most boring least engaging ways possible - most of the time they don't even show the guns going off, just really close-up shots of the people's upper bodies, or really far-away shots with badly-integrated gun sound effects going off.
Likewise, the script had to be the most run of the mill cardboard-cutout boring action script that was going around the studios at the time, filled with huge overdone cliche' after huge overdone cliche', and not in the fun cheesy 'we're making fun of these things!' tongue-in-cheek way, no, it was in the 'oh man, these things rock, we are so smart!' totally oblivious kind of way. It also didn't help that the music was constantly way over-dramatic and almost never fit the scenes that it was playing in.
I would not go out of my way to see this movie, and I probably wouldn't even watch much of it if I came across it on TV at some point, but if you see that it's on TV some late night, it may be worth watching a little bit of, just for the fun performances. And hey, if you got some beer in the fridge, you might even want to stick it out all the way through and make a fun drinking game out of all the action movie cliche's they over-use and beat you over the head with. Of course, you'll have alcohol poisoning by the end of it, but it may just be worth it in order to get through all of this first movie in the Operation Delta Force series.
Yes, I said series. Apparently there's 5 or 6 sequels to this. God help us all...
2/10 rooms in the Psych Ward
