Delta Force One: The Lost Patrol

DELTA FORCE ONE: THE LOST PATROL (1999)

Directed by: Joseph Zito
Screenplay: Clay McBride & Peter Wellbeck
Starring: Gary Daniels, Mike Norris, Bentley Mitchum & John Rhys Davies

An inept action film, Delta Force One bares little resemblance to the Chuck Norris originals (despite his son actually being in this one) and all those spin off flicks Operation Delta Force 1 thru 300. Most of them were at least mildly entertaining and attempted to stage some fun action but this flick doesn’t even bother with that. Slow, tedious and monumentally dull, Delta Force One sees a squad of Delta dudes go into the desert to find out what happened to one of their patrols that has gone missing and stop John Rhys Davies and a bunch of other yahoos from setting of a nuclear bomb. What ensues is not very much at all.

Despite pretty good production values and the director of Red Scorpion (which at least had some decent action in it) on board, Delta Force One is lame, lame, lame. Nothing ever really happens, lots of scenes of people talking about their plans, talking about how evil they are gonna be and some sub plot with a kid who seems to, well, I really don’t know what as his scenes also seemed to go on and on with nothing actually happening. What action there is certainly isn’t great apart from an ok shootout at the end. The worst has to be many scenes of the heroes driving around in a big jeep and always getting ambushed by the bad guys who are at such close range they could not fail to hit them with their rocket launchers. But they do miss, over and over so it just becomes ludicrous.

This is maybe what they were going for: ludicrous. At the end of the film they do one of those freeze frame things of all the characters saying what happened to them after completing the mission. Except the text is completely taking the piss out of the characters and basically describing how inept there were at their specific roles and in turn how crap the movie actually is. Eh!? Did I miss something? If the film was a parody of the action genre then it certainly wasn’t a very good one and if it ain’t (which I don’t think it is, not intentionally anyway) then why make a big joke of it at the end? B-movie action flicks certainly do push the limits of absurdness but attaching a bunch of ‘joke’ credits at the end of your flick thus changing the complete tone and purpose of the film you just watched is, well, just rubbish.

I’m a big Gary Daniels fan but I can’t even recommend this just based on him being in it. Not a good action flick and not a good parody of action films if in fact it was supposed to be! My head hurts…