"Is that Will Ferrell?"
My brother asked this when I showed him a still of Brian Bostwick as Ace Hunter.
That question sums up the experience of watching Megaforce.
Megaforce was an infamous bomb in 1982, only resurrected in the popular conscience when Trey Parker and Matt Stone made Team America - World Police.
Directed by Hal Needham, Megaforce is a bizarre one-off.
It beats little resemblance to anything released before it, and feels like a parody of the things which came out after it (chief amongst them being the GI Joe cartoon).
Going into it, my expectations were based on Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit - I was expecting something similar in terms of stunts and tone.
It’s too simple in story - the film feels deliberately so - but there is nothing to it. The story takes too many tangents to get going, and the final action sequence comes too late to save it.
I think it wants to be over-the-top and a bit silly, but it is missing a sense of wit.
Barry Bostwick is a good actor but the material requires a more earnest approach than he delivers. With the self-aware charisma of Burt Reynolds, the character and the movie might have worked.
The stunts are great, but there are not enough of them.
One interesting wrinkle is that the hero and villain are best friends and bear no animosity toward each other. As with the rest of the movie, I don’t think Bostwick and Henry Silva have the right chemistry to pull it off.
What is fascinating about the movie is how much it did predict the direction of American popular culture.
The focus on hardware and Ace Hunter’s skin-tight bodysuit would soon be outdone by the heavy firepower and ripped bodies of Stallone and Schwarzenegger. The Austrian Oak, in particular, was able to craft a body of work which rode the line between earnest thrills and tongue in cheek that Megaforce strives for.
Frankly, the movie is kind of annoying - mostly because it feels so sure of itself. It makes the failure to execute so much more irksome.
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