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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