Delta Force 2 - The Colombian Connection AKA Operation Stranglehold (Aaron Norris, 1990)

After a team of DEA agents are kidnapped by drug lord Ramon Cota (Billy Drago), Delta Force veteran Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris) is tasked with organising a rescue.

When a friend is murdered by Cota, McCoy’s mission to save lives is complicated by his own desire for vengeance.

I was not put onto Delta Force 2 until the Action Boyz podcast reviewed it last year. Even then, it took another catalyst to get me to switch it on.

I’ve been slowly making my way through the filmography of Brian De Palma, and one of my highlights of watching The Untouchables was Billy Drago as Capone enforcer Frank Nitti.

With those deepset eyes, the full, sullen lips, permanently in a half-sneer, and that wonderfully dynamic voice, veering between reedy and a deep growl, Drago was born to play extremes.

 He was so eye-catching, I wanted to see more of him. 

He is one of the best elements of Delta Force 2, a very silly movie that has gained a terrifying weight in the months since I first watched it.

As drug lord Ramon Cota, Drago understands exactly what kind of movie he is in, leaning into the character’s sadism with relish.

Cota is a cartoon of depravity - part of his introduction is killing a man, enslaving a woman for sex, and ordering the murder of her baby. It helps that these actions are kept offscreen - they are so hideous that listening to Drago casually toss them off comes off as ridiculous.

With his army of henchmen and palatial estate (complete with evil boardroom and attached gas chamber), Cota is basically the devil as Bond villain.

And the Bond comparisons do not end there. In fact, I think one of the Norris brothers is a Bond fan - the staging of the parachute stunts is reminiscent of the pre-titles of Moonraker, while McCoy’s attempts to climb the side of the mountain are very similar to For Your Eyes Only.

The movie starts quickly: a DEA team tries to catch Cota at a Carnival costume party. While the agents unmask the wrong person, they get ambushed by assassins dressed as clowns (another reference to Moonraker?). 

Norris’s McCoy is quickly assigned, and they capture Cota. The villain gets out on a technicality - and then seeks horrific retribution against McCoy’s friend Bobby Chavez’s (Paul Perri) family.

Bobby goes on a solo mission, and is captured by Cota. It looks like it is about to become a revenge picture. But then he is murdered by Cota in a ridiculous contraption.

So the film turns into a rescue mission of the DEA agents, with additional motivation from his friend’s death.

At this point, the movie starts to lose steam.

This movie should be used as an example for what not to do with a ‘men-on-a-mission’ movie.

We are shown preparations for the mission, but these preparations are not structured in a dramatically fulfilling way. There is no obstacle to work out and overcome, no team-building, no development of a strategy.

We just get a collection of soldiers doing various tasks - it is too to be a montage, too non-specific in focus to carry any weight.

For context, I watched a couple of Norris movies around this one: Forced Vengeance and Invasion USA. 

The latter was more instructive on the Cannon ethos.

 

Cannon movies took the moral absolutism of the action genre - bad people can only be stopped by violence - and pushed it to the most ridiculous extreme.

Company co-honcho Menachem Golan was famous for cutting his action pictures to the bone, chopping out anything that was not an action scene. Invasion USA is almost a supernatural thriller, as our hero magically shows up whenever the villains are creating trouble.

Delta Force 2 seems caught between two different types of action picture - the simplistic shoot-em-ups Norris had made previously, and something more sophisticated (the lip service paid toward international law and working around it to catch Cota).

Ultimately, despite the international intrigue of the plot, Delta Force 2 does not seem that invested, and defaults to a straightforward action picture. When it does, the movie is fun - but then it will fumble seemingly familiar elements like the training sequence.

The finale is another frustrating flub. 

This film has been operating on a base kind of action movie logic - we have spent the movie building Cota up as the embodiment of evil. And he is also shown as the head of a massive army of thugs. 

You are meant to watch his actions, and his opulent hideout, and expect some kind of violent retribution - Cota will die and his hideout will get absolutely destroyed.

As the third act gets underway, McCoy is allied with Begoña Plaza’s Quiquina Esquilinta, the woman whose family Cota slaughters at the start of the film.

Based on her reappearance, one would expect that she will play some kind of role in Cota’s demise - maybe saving McCoy at a key moment and/or delivering the killing blow to the villain - a dramatically satisfying resolution to the chaos Cota unleashed on her life.

That assumption would be wrong. Not only does she not get her revenge, Cota murders her and is captured - not killed - by the film’s hero.

What’s worse is that the build-up to Quiquina and Cota’s reunion feels like the set up to a final confrontation - his shockingly easy dispatching of her is a surprise, but it completely deflates any catharsis.

Usually I like a little more originality from my action pictures, but with Delta Force 2’s fumbles of basic genre cliches and plot moves made me feel the opposite way.

Individual set pieces are fun - resolution aside, the third act delivers on the action - and Drago’s performance is a joy. While watchable, I would recommend the film to a very specific audience - burgeoning action movie filmmakers.

You can learn a lot from watching a wide variety of films - and watching a movie that is not fully functional, not achieving its own goals, can be more instructive than watching films which do.

Watching Delta Force 2, as a critic who loves action movies, was a lesson in appreciating and understanding how the genre works. 

A less palatable lesson was contextual.

When I first watched this movie, Trump had just broken international law, kidnapped the president of Venezuela. I decided to bench this review for a month or so. And then Trump and Netanyahu started an illegal war with Iran. 

As the world’s superpowers give up the pretence of an international rules-based order, Delta Force 2 feels like even more of a relic.

In the movie, our heroes bristle at being unable to violate another country’s sovereign airspace to destroy a menace from south of the border. This conflict with rules of engagement and international law is more foregrounded than McCoy’s struggle to abandon the rescue mission to just assassinate Cota.

And now the US is acting with impunity. They are not even attempting to fake a justification for their senseless destruction.

Delta Force 2 was not a hit. Its cultural footprint is almost nil. But in its own simple way, it encapsulates a mode of thinking about America’s place in the world that is now directly informing foreign policy in a way that it never has before.

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Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 2009)

When his family’s circumstances force him to rethink his plans for Harvard, college graduate James (Jesse Eisenberg) has to take a summer job at the local theme park to make up the shortfall.

James forms bonds with the various misfits who keep the park running, including the worldly Connell (Ryan Reynolds) and a young woman in a similar stage of crisis, Em (Kristen Stewart).

As the summer progresses, his relationships with these new friends force James to reconsider his future in very different ways…

I watched Adventureland a few months ago, and have been tinkering with this review ever since.

Revising it after watching Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, I was struck by the parallels. 

If anything, the working class struggles of those earlier films find their echo here - in a film set in the same time period, featuring characters who just a step beyond the Hughes protagonists - they have left high school, but they are still stuck in place.

There has been no great awakening, no greater sense of plan or purpose.

I was a big fan of SuperBad, Motolla’s previous film, and so I was keenly following the production of this film.

From memory I do not think it got a cinema release.

I remember leaving it a little disappointed. I had been expecting SuperBad 2. By that measure, Adventureland never stood a chance.

But despite being completely contrary to my expectations, it stuck with me.

Its sense of melancholy and hopelessness resonated. This film was coming out right in the middle of the financial crisis, which made its characters’ struggle against the materialism of their peers hit even harder.

In the years since Adventureland’s release, Eighties nostalgia has become an industry unto itself. 

It makes Adventureland’s portrayal so refreshing: The period is not treated as a joke or a site for homage. If anything, it is a bleak foreshadowing for every generation to follow in these characters’ footsteps.

John Carpenter once said the eighties never ended, and it is hard to disagree (even in NZ, we are still living with the repercussions of the changes of that decade through our localised version, Rogernomics).

While the decade’s focus on accumulation, on making money, looms over them, the characters in Adventureland find themselves searching for meaning outside of the daily grind.

The cast are uniformly excellent.

Adventureland might feature the best use of Ryan Reynolds.

Cursed with a deadpan wit and good looks, Reynolds either comes off as too smarmy in comedies or too insincere in straight dramatic roles. He is not incapable of delivering a good or great performance (Mississippi Grind is heartbreaking), but few films have caught his innate vacuousness.

This character is a fraud. A cool front hiding a complete lack of character. Reynolds is incredible.

He might be older, but he is also caught in his own kind of arrested development, and seems content to stay there.

This is bragging but I have been a fan of Kristen Stewart before her breakout success in Twilight.

I had seen her in Panic Room around the same time I had seen SuperBad, and I was struck by how unmannered and understated her performance was.

I was not that plugged into actors but Stewart seemed so singular I went looking for her other work. The film that sold me on her was Speak, a quietly devastating TV movie about sexual assault that she had anchored with an understated, though highly literate, emotionally charged performance.

I had kept her on my radar, and ended up going to see Twilight when it opened. While I thought she did a good job, the movie did not hook me - I was glad to see the movie succeed, and hoped it might pave the way for more high-profile gigs in movies featuring witches and huntsmen. 

Adventureland was the movie that confirmed my feelings about Stewart, and I was completely unsurprised by the critical reappraisal she has enjoyed after the Bella-Edward-Jacob fever had died down.

Seemingly more mature and together than her new beau, Em is even more lost than James. What Stewart sells is the tragedy of self-awareness - Em is stuck in a situation she loathes, but she has no idea how to get out of it.

It is a performance that juggles the characters’ contradictions with delicacy and a lack of external signifiers. Em is constantly trying to put on a front of ironic detachment, but Stewart never loses sight of the character’s deepset sense of loneliness.

In the lead, Jesse Eisenberg manages to dodge a familiar archetype (the neurotic intellectual college leaver) - his comic asides feel more like an emotional release, and less targeted for the funny bone.

This quality applies to the film’s tone overall, and was probably a reason why I was not keen on it on my initial viewing - there is no rat-a-tat of banter ala Superbad, and no big setpieces.

Adventureland is quieter, more melancholic and reflective. 

Greg Mottola has had a successful career in the years since (put your hands up for Confess, Fletch!), but I hope gets back to this territory.

A great film.

Related

Starter for 10

Confess, Fletch

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One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

Decades after he went on the run, an ex-radical (Leonardo DiCaprio) finds himself and his daughter (Chase Infiniti) targeted by the white supremacist Christmas Adventurers Club and their attack dog Lockjaw (Sean Penn).

I was not in a hurry to get this review out. I wanted to take my time with it, and absorb some of the context around it. I had no real angle to write from.

A couple years ago I had a silly idea to do a themed series covering the career of PT Anderson, except I would pretend PT was the same filmmaker as Paul WS Anderson.

This is the movie where it feels like their respective paths could converge. Kind of.

In light of the recent news about the Warner Brothers sale, writing about One Battle After Another gained a new layer of pathos. If this merger goes through, the results will not be good.

In its pieces, this movie has the heart of exploitation cinema: A band of radical women activists hiding out as nuns; Teyana Taylor is styled as an action heroine, complete with - at one point - a massive machine gun.

But all of these elements are surface. What the movie is ultimately about is taking these images of rebellion and revolution and breaking them down, showing the ways in which real change is accomplished without the overt heroics (and implied individualism) the early scenes present - instead it is the less glamorous work, of ongoing interpersonal relationships and community-building, which can cause the most important shifts.

While it is based on a novel (which I have not read) this movie is so primed for 2025 America.

Underneath the action scenes and comedy, there is a throbbing pulse of rage to the movie - a righteous anger at the state of the world, and the foundational sins of the country that still carries so much weight.

 

It did not help that before the screening I had watched the footage of an immigrant woman being tackled by an ICE agent outside a courtroom - a brutal display of state violence. The film’s focus on white supremacy and immigration carried an extra charge.

The film is split into two halves:

In the first half, we follow the revolutionary group Paris 76 in their youth, directly engaging the government (freeing immigrants from a Denton centre; leaving bombs in government buildings; robbing banks).

In the second, we are dropped into the present, as DiCaprio’s “Bob”, paranoid and disillusioned, tries to raise his daughter according to the principles he lived by with his old comrades.

Teyana Taylor, so impressive in Three Thousand and One, is the deceptively solid sun around which the first part of the film orbits.

She is a mythic figure, an archetype of a strong black woman. Highly sexual AND physically imposing, she feels like a descendant of Pam Grier’s action heroines of the seventies.

She seems like the perfect embodiment of the white establishment’s fears and desires - as well as her partners’.

In the early scenes I was a little disconcerted - I thought she was a bit too broad. 

But that image turns out to be a lie - in the end, she is just a human being, as flawed and capable of failure as anyone else.

It is a shocking, brutal reveal. And it plays to the film’s broader focus on the difference between people who play with a belief system, and those who do the work, make the sacrifice to embody it. 

DiCaprio’s Pat/Bob is the positive inverse of his role in Killers of the Flower Moon - whereas that film presented him as an antagonist who is capable of recognising his own moral failings, but too weak to rise above them.

Here he is playing a character who initially tries to be an ally and work against the institutions which are designed for him, but when the film jumps forward in time, he has given that up. The most he will do is performative (offering a (correct) analysis of the US presidents during a parent-teacher meeting).

Ultimately he does not become the film’s hero - and he saves no one. 

As his daughter Charlene, Chase Infiniti is a welcome balance - she spends most of the movie apart from her father, and the actress more than holds her own against heavyweights like Sean Penn and Regina Hall.

Sean Penn’s emotionally stunted, childish soldier is both terrifying and pathetic, while the club he worships are both all-powerful and ridiculous, capable of great damage but unable to quash dissent or destroy the communities they are seeking to eradicate.

It is a performance of tics but it works for a man struggling to find a channel for his own desires - until he finds the perfect avatar in Taylor’s Perfidia.

One performance that has thankfully not gone unnoticed is Regina Hall - as one of Bob/Pat’s comrades who comes to rescue Charlene, she delivers the most understated yet nuanced portrayal in the film. She is almost in a different movie from the more heightened characters around her, yet she also grounds it. 

There is a scene toward the end, where she has to make a choice, which is the most emotionally devastating in the film. And that recognition is delivered purely in her face. It is a fantastic showcase for an actress who seems to be capable of anything (is Scary Movie 6 something I should review?).

This movie earns its 162 min runtime, and it is built for IMAX. The final meeting between Lockjaw and the bounty hunter in the desert is breathtaking.

One of the best movies of the year.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!