CHUCK'S ROUNDHOUSE: Missing in Action 2: The Beginning (1985)

Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were confident in their plan to rush out a movie suspiciously similar to “Rambo: First Blood Part II” six whole months before the soon-to-be blockbuster was released. So confident, in fact, that they decided to double-down and get two “Rambo” knock-offs in theaters before Sylvester Stallone donned his red bandana again. “Missing in Action” and its sequel would be filmed back-to-back. The first film would depict Colonel Braddock's escape from the Vietnamese P.O.W. camp back in early seventies. The second would show him going back, in the present day, and rescuing the men who were left behind. Lance Hool would direct the first and Joseph Zito would direct the second. Upon getting a look at the finished movies, however, Golan and Globus decided the intended sequel was better than the original. Probably because it was more directly imitative of “Rambo” and had more explosions. To resolve any confusion, they simply flipped the titles. Zito's “Missing in Action” became the first film. Hool's became “Missing in Action 2: The Beginning,” the subtitle presumably added to clarify to audiences that this was a prequel. 

In the summer of 1972, Colonel James Braddock and his team would be deployed via helicopter into the jungles of Vietnam. Their mission to offer support to pinned down U.S. forces would go horribly wrong. The helicopter was shot down. Braddock and his men – Captain Nester, Lieutenant Mazilli, Corporal Opelka, and Master Sergeant Franklin – are captured by the North Vietnamese army. They spend the next two years under the brutal supervision of Colonel Yin, who delights in physically and psychologically torturing the Americans. The men are not let free as Yin schemes to get Braddock to sign a bogus confession admitting to war crimes, which he refuses to do. As the situation grows graver and men begin to die, Braddock makes his own move to escape the prison camp, free his men, and take Yin down himself.

 

“Missing in Action” was, of course, ridiculous agitprop designed to make American audiences hoot and cheer as revenge is taken against those nasty Vietnamese who so bruised our national ego back in 1975. Its Vietnamese characters were mostly villains, two-dimensional bad guys for our patriotic hero to vanquish. Having seen “The Beginning,” I'm surprised to say that Zito's sequel actually toned down the propagandist xenophobia of Hool's work. The North Vietnamese forces in “Missing in Action II” are depicted as almost inhuman in their sadism. Men are strung up and stabbed with knives, beaten on the regular, and kept in cages deep in the ground. They are forced to fight for their captives' amusement or stripped naked and paraded before mocking prostitutes. A notable moment has Norris hung upside down while a bag containing a starved rat is placed over his face. The torment is not merely physical. Yin regularly plays a “game” with the prisoners, in which he places a gun to their heads and pulls the trigger, only to reveal that the pistol is unloaded. He tells the boys that America has already lost the war, that no one is coming to save them. He informs Braddock that he's been declared dead and his wife has already remarried. When Franklin becomes deathly ill with malaria, his friends are told he's being injected with drugs to keep him alive when it's actually a fatal dose of opium. If that wasn't bad enough, Yin then kills Mazilli's pet chicken and hands him the dead bird. 

All throughout, Yin dangles the possibility of freedom before Braddock, as long as he signs that paper admitting to bogus war crimes against the Vietnamese. The warden claims that Braddock and his men have been kept here as long as they have because they are not prisoners of war but rather criminals. History, of course, tells us that the United States armed forces did inflict horrible war crimes against non-combatants in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and the Viet-Cong did horrible things too, mostly to the South Vietnamese. All of this is a matter of public record. War is not a children's game, where one side is good and the other is bad. Exploitation films like “Missing in Action II” hope to drive ticket sales by playing on the audience's emotions. Obviously, Americans want to see themselves as the heroes, the victims of hideous atrocities and never the perpetrators of it. By depicting the Vietnamese forces as such brutally evil people, who then have the gull to falsely accuse the Americans of being just as bad, is to further facilitate ugly cheers and whoops in 42nd Street theaters and anywhere else. 

The result is a motion picture with a real malicious energy flowing through it. An early scene has an failed escape attempt ending with an American set on fire via flamethrower, his suffering lingered on. Later, when Braddock gets his hand on the same device, he turns the flame on the Vietnamese in a similarly ruthless fashion. The torture scenes and gladiatorial combat are not merely bloody but brutal too. Since this is a war movie, there's little guarantee that anyone will survive these events. Whenever a bit of hope is dangled before the P.O.W.s – a helicopter appearing overhead or an Australian photographer appearing and claiming to be from a human rights organization – it inevitably ends badly. Honestly, out of the first two "Missing in Action" films, if I had to guess which one was made by a horror movie specialist, I would assume it was this one. 

"Rambo: First Blood Part II" turned its nationalistic rage against the Vietnamese into over-the-top camp, difficult to take seriously as anything but comic book theatricality. "Missing in Action" aims for something grittier and uglier. So why watch the prequel then? First off, "The Beginning" feels like one of those fifties Men's Adventures pulp story, in its focus on physical agony, tough men in tougher situations, and racist caricatures as villains. There is a cultural context to be gleamed from this motion picture, in other words. It also, eventually, does become an entertaining action movie in its own right. Once Braddock escapes the camp and turns the tide on his captives, this becomes a fast-paced enough flick with some solid stunts from Norris and some pyrotechnics. While Zito's "Missing in Action" mostly limits its star's karate abilities, "The Beginning" smartly climaxes with a one-on-one showdown between Braddock and Yin. It's a very good fight, maybe the best of Norris' whole film career up to this point. Moreover, after watching an entire movie of Colonel Yin being so wicked towards everyone, watching him get beat up is quite satisfying. It helps that Yin played with an impressively vicious glee by Soon-tek Oh, making a fine villain. 

I commented in my review of the first "Missing in Action" that it seemed to feature Chuck Norris evolving into an actually semi-decent actor. Knowing that "The Beginning" was shot first reveals this as the movie where Norris finally started to put some non-kicking/non-punching skills behind his movies. Supposedly, Chuck thought about his brother's death during the scene where Braddock is forced to watch one of his men die, the martial artist actually employing a bit of what you might call the Method there. Lool manages to get a surprising degree of pathos out of Norris' eyes during the many shots of them peering through the bars of his prison. There is a sense of camaraderie between the ensemble here. None of the guys are developed much beyond one or two characteristics – Cosie Costa probably does the best as Mazilli – but you do get the feeling that they all care about each other.

"Missing in Action 2" is a hard movie to defend, in many ways. It's a fairly ugly exploitation movie, not only in terms of content but also in the real sense of rage it directs towards its villains. Villains very much meant to stand-in for an entire nation of people, or at least their military forces. The movie represents some very sour grapes from the world's super power, demonizing its enemies and then executing them. At the same time, it's well-made, ultimately becoming quite efficient in getting the intended reaction out of the viewer. It also happens to feature some pretty bad-ass Chuck Norris stuff, the reason we watch these movies after all. It's certainly a much more interesting film than the prior "Missing in Action," which was less memorable in terms of action and not as compelling in its pacing. Being a fan of action movies means liking some ethically dubious shit some times, which is the feeling I have as I give "Missing in Action 2" a positive final score. [7/10] 

[THE CHUCK OF NORRIS: 5 outta 5]
[X] Facial Hair
[X] Jumps or Kicks Through a Window or Wall
[X] Performs Spin Kick or Spin Punch to Enemy's Face
[X] Shows Off His Hairy Chest
[X] Sports Some Cowboy Getup