This is a fun flick, and might be the only Chuck Norris movie that can actually be considered a Good Movie by traditional standards. The first half is a serious drama involving a plane hijacking (based on true events), and if you were to catch this on TV partway through without knowing what it was, you might be inclined to take it seriously. Robert Forster is a wonderful villain, and he makes these scenes interesting (and scary) to watch.
In the second half, Chuck Norris starts blowing things up on a torpedo-launching motorcycle and all seriousness goes out the window. That's not to say the movie doesn't get any less enjoyable. I don't care who are you; it's impossible to watch this without wishing you had a motorcycle like that.
Of course there are some problems. The score is totally ripped off from "Where Eagles Dare," and the politics are ridiculously one-sided (according to this movie, the whole reason Palestine doesn't like Israel is because the Israelis are Jewish. It has nothing to do with a land dispute or anything). The patriotism is so over the top, you wonder if this is the exact movie Trey Parker and Matt Stone were spoofing in "Team America: World Police" (gotta love how Norris and friends spend twenty minutes vaporizing Beirut, and suddenly have to pause the action for the death of one American soldier). But if you're smart enough to watch this without buying into the black and white Bad Guys/Good Guys politics, you might see it as another one of the big, dumb, exciting action flicks that defined the 80's and made them the most purely entertaining--intentionally or not--decade for film ever.
In the second half, Chuck Norris starts blowing things up on a torpedo-launching motorcycle and all seriousness goes out the window. That's not to say the movie doesn't get any less enjoyable. I don't care who are you; it's impossible to watch this without wishing you had a motorcycle like that.
Of course there are some problems. The score is totally ripped off from "Where Eagles Dare," and the politics are ridiculously one-sided (according to this movie, the whole reason Palestine doesn't like Israel is because the Israelis are Jewish. It has nothing to do with a land dispute or anything). The patriotism is so over the top, you wonder if this is the exact movie Trey Parker and Matt Stone were spoofing in "Team America: World Police" (gotta love how Norris and friends spend twenty minutes vaporizing Beirut, and suddenly have to pause the action for the death of one American soldier). But if you're smart enough to watch this without buying into the black and white Bad Guys/Good Guys politics, you might see it as another one of the big, dumb, exciting action flicks that defined the 80's and made them the most purely entertaining--intentionally or not--decade for film ever.