No one would argue that Apocalypse Now (1979) isn’t a classic film. I’ve long had a fascination with the Vietnam War and its representation in the media and the reputation that Apocalypse Now carried within that sub-genre of American film was known to me even before I began the serious study of film. The DVD revolution meant that a lot of classic films were being cleaned up and re-released in this new format, with some directors taking the opportunity to revisit their earlier work. One such director was Francis Ford Coppola and he was revisiting Apocalypse Now, hoping to release a version of the film that fit his original vision. This was Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) a remarkably unsubtle title to the film. I bought the Redux version in 2002, shortly after I had started studying film at college. I had heard wonderful things about Apocalypse Now and was of the mind at the time that it could only be better if the director had brought his original vision to life.
I was wrong. I’m not here to shit on Apocalypse Now Redux, that’s not what the Apple Park Film Club is about. However, I distinctly remember feeling let down by Apocalypse Now Redux. How could a film with such a reputation feel so long and tedious? As years have passed, I’ve come to the understanding that Apocalypse Now is a film about the journey. When the journey stops at the French plantation, so does the film and it takes a long time to get its momentum back.
I don’t really want to discuss Apocalypse Now. Instead, I want to continue the exploration of my cinematic journey. Films set during or after the Vietnam War played a distinct role in my upbringing. Well, less the films themselves and more the actor who headlined them. See, the UK has very strict laws regarding what people can watch at the cinema. Whereas in the US the R rating means that anyone under 17 has to be accompanied by an adult, the UK equivalents of 15 and 18 mean that no one under that age can see those films, with or without an adult. Watching RoboCop (1987) at such an early age meant that I had already crossed the Rubicon, so not being able to see films in the cinema left me with few options. Thank God for VHS. According to the documentary Ban The Sadist Videos (2005) the UK had one of, if not, the highest take-ups of video recorder technology in the eighties when the technology first blew up. This meant it was incredibly easy for film lovers in the UK to amass vast collections of films on VHS. One such man was my Uncle.
Growing up, I mostly watched films on VHS. We didn’t have a lot of money so buying VHSs was usually relegated to Christmas and Birthdays, or if we found the video in a sale or at a car boot sale. Thus, I had three main sources:
Recording films off of the television (these were heavily edited for TV).
A mobile video store (more on that in another article)
My Uncle’s video cabinet.
The widest expansion of my film knowledge came from borrowing movies from my Uncle’s collection. I don’t remember exactly when, but at some point, one-man roundhouse kicked his way into my movie-watching life. That man was Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris is a bit of a controversial figure these days given the whole ‘selling end of the world survival kits online’ thing, but for me, Norris was my first experience of the ‘movie star.’ For many people my age, Schwarzenegger was the first movie star they became conscious of. I love Schwarzenegger movies too, but Norris was the one for me. I don’t remember which Chuck Norris film I saw first, but I want to use this article to explore all of his films that had an impact on me. As per the title of this entry of the substack, I’ll start with Norris’ Vietnam saga, the Missing In Action trilogy.
It may very well be the case that Missing In Action was the first Chuck Norris film I saw. As I mentioned in the previous article, my love of film almost directly comes from my love of sharks. In Missing In Action our hero, James Braddock, travels up the river into Vietnam on a boat decorated to look like a shark. That minor connection was probably enough to send my head reeling and fix in my mind that these films were something special.
The Missing In Action trilogy is rather fascinating in how they approach the subject of the Vietnam War compared to more serious films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon (1986). Whilst Apocalypse Now and Platoon examine the horrors of the war, a war that they suggest the United States shouldn’t have gotten involved with, the Missing In Action trilogy approaches the war from a far more conservative viewpoint. They viewed Vietnam as a mistake that needed correcting. The films seem to have a central thesis of ‘if only we could go back, we’d do it properly this time.’
The Missing In Action trilogy marks the start of Chuck Norris’ movie star phase. After starring in a series of low-budget independent action films, all heavily influenced by Hong Kong cinema, Chuck Norris decided it was time he took on major studio pictures. His experience making his earlier film Good Guys Wear Black (1978) had taught him the importance of taking control of his career. There wasn’t a studio that wanted to release Good Guys Wear Black, so Norris and the film’s producers released the films themselves. It wound up making its budget back eighteen times (Interestingly enough Good Guys Wear Black is an anti-Vietnam film, in which Norris’ character lectures in political science and talks about how the US shouldn’t have gotten involved). The same was true of his follow up film, The Octagon (1980), no one wanted to distribute the film so Norris and the Producers took it upon themselves, grossing an incredible $20,000,000 in the process. At this point, Norris was arguably America’s first homegrown martial artist movie star and provided an alternative to imported Hong Kong action films. Shortly after this he formed his own company, Top Kick Productions (what else?), and developed the film Silent Rage (1982). Silent Rage was the first time Norris worked with a major studio (Columbia) and it led to a multi-picture deal with MGM Studios, although he walked away from this after one film. His success in the US set, spaghetti western influence Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) led to Norris signing a multi-picture deal with Cannon Films, who signed him up to Missing In Action and Missing In Action 2, The Beginning.
When talking about the Missing Action Trilogy, I want to address them in chronological order. The order in which the films were meant to be seen. The first two films in the series were commissioned back to back, and Missing In Action 2: The Beginning (1985) was supposed to be the first film in the series. However, director Lance Hool made a far more introspective film than Joseph Zito’s Missing In Action (1984). There were concerns within Cannon that if Missing In Action 2: The Beginning were released first (with a different name, obviously) it might not draw audiences in for the second film (Missing In Action). This is quite a sensible move because the films are quite different in terms of pacing and content. When I say that Lance Hool made a far more introspective film, I don’t mean that Missing In Action 2: The Beginning is a slow, more pondering film than action fans might expect. The first hour or so of the film is a slow-paced back-and-forth between Norris’ James Braddock and Soon-Tek Oh’s Colonel Win, as Win subjects Braddock and the POWs to physical and psychological torture. Win gets hold of a letter from Braddock’s wife and informs him that she intends to remarry. Before Braddock can read the letter, Win burns it. Win forces Braddock to hang upside down on a rope with his head wrapped in a sack containing an angry rat. POWs are stripped naked and humiliated, routinely threatened with execution by gunshot, only for the gun to be empty, and Win even withholds malaria treatment from one of the POWs. It’s only after the culmination of this torture, that Braddock finally breaks and gives in to Win’s demands so his friend can get his malaria treatment, only to be double-crossed, that the film picks up steam. At this point, Braddock escapes the POW camp, and returns several times, each time freeing another POW, killing more guards, and stealing more weapons. Ultimately it leads to a showdown with Win, where Win gets his arse handed to him by Braddock, who barely breaks a sweat. A sign of America’s true dominance over the Vietcong.
When I was younger, Missing In Action 2: The Beginning was my least favourite of the trilogy. It was slow, I wasn’t old enough to understand the psychology of it, and most importantly, Chuck Norris wasn’t killing people until the final thirty minutes. To me, it felt like the film took forever to get there, although there is an incredible scene where Braddock torches two soldiers with a flamethrower that was so brutal, it terrified me as a child. However, having rewatched the film expressly for this article, I’ve concluded it’s a far more interesting film than Joseph Zito’s Missing In Action. In his essay, Narrative Patterns and Mythic Trajectories in Mid-1980s Vietnam Movies (found in the excellent book edited by Michael Anderegg, Inventing Vietnam), Tony Williams discusses the political underpinnings of the film. It’s important to remember that Joseph Zito’s Missing In Action was a script that Canon was developing before they signed Chuck Norris to a multi-picture deal, whereas Missing In Action 2: The Beginning was a script brought to Norris by director Lance Hool. Norris had some influence over the Missing In Action 2 script and he had never been shy about his views on the war. The film doesn’t hide the characters’ feelings about the people who left them behind, and it is no coincidence that the turncoat character, Nester (played by Steven Williams), is black given how critical of the Vietnam war the black community was, feeling that “it absorbed resources that should have been used to improve conditions for African Americans.” (Black Liberation and the Vietnam War).
By comparison, Missing In Action is a far more straightforward action film. One thing that always surprises me is that we see Braddock’s escape from the POW camp, and it doesn’t mirror the escape as seen in Missing In Action 2: The Beginning. Cannon films made exploitation and B-pictures. Their whole business model involved buying cheap scripts and rushing them into production (This article focuses on Chuck Norris, but I’ll no doubt explore Cannon Films in a future piece). However, given that the two films were planned around a back-to-back shoot and release, you would imagine they would make sure the timeline matched up. That aside, we join Braddock in Ho Chi Minh City to give evidence about POWs still trapped in Vietnam. Braddock’s claims are dismissed, even by the Americans involved, so he takes it upon himself to find proof. What follows is a series of increasingly outlandish action sequences where Braddock finds himself in Thailand, looking for his old army buddy Tuck (played marvelously by M. Emmet Walsh) who helps him sneak into Vietnam by boat (not unlike Apocalypse Now). It’s here that Braddock finds the POWs have been moved in a bid to hide them from the Americans. Braddock and Tuck race back downriver, intercept the trucks carrying the POWs, rescue them, and after Tuck sacrifices himself so Braddock and the POWs can escape, they go straight to the POW inquiry and burst through the doors.
It’s Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985) without the budget. This isn’t an accusation on my part, it’s an open secret that the team at Cannon read James Cameron’s treatment for First Blood Part 2, loved it, and were ‘inspired’ by it. With the Rambo franchise starring Stallone (arguably the second biggest movie star in Hollywood at the time), there was no way Cannon could afford to finance First Blood Part 2. They could, however, make their version. The official story about switching the release dates of the first two Missing In Action films being about pacing and marketability does ring true, but one can’t help but speculate as to whether or not they wanted to get Missing In Action out a year before First Blood Part 2 as to avoid any controversy. Regardless of its status as a low-budget Rambo interpretation, Missing in Action is probably one of the shining examples of B-Action pictures made during the 80s (for me it’s a five-star film), especially when compared to other Cannon action pictures from the era such American Ninja (1985) and American Ninja 2 (1987). People forget that Jean-Claude Van Damme didn’t come on the scene until 1988 and Steven Seagal’s films were released by major studios. Although often associated with them, Chuck Norris was not playing on the same field as Van Damme and Seagal.
The final film in the Missing In Action Trilogy came three years after Missing In Action 2. It was a film that was made out of necessity rather than outright desire. I don’t think anyone looked at the first two films and thought, ‘We need a third film to tie this together.' Cannon was in dire straits financially after they had tried to move into blockbuster filmmaking with Lifeforce (1985), Masters of the Universe (1987), and the box office catastrophe that was Superman 4: The Quest For Peace (1987), a string of films that were sold as event movies, but maintained the Cannon B-picture aesthetic. They also bought the rights to make a Spiderman film in 1985 but never got it off the ground. This meant that Cannon needed a hit. Something that could appeal to its core audience, starring a recognisable face. Chuck Norris had made other films for Cannon since Missing In Action 2, but it was the name Missing In Action that carried the weight as far as Cannon was concerned. Reportedly, Norris felt differently. He had no interest in making a third Missing In Action film and Cannon had to force his hand. It was only when made aware of the plight of Amerasian children left behind in Vietnam that Norris decided he could make a Missing In Action 3. And boy, what a film it is.
If anything makes it clear that Norris had little or nothing to do with the narrative direction of the first Missing In Action, it’s Braddock: Missing In Action 3. The script is co-written by Norris and deals with Braddock returning to Vietnam twelve years after the fall of Saigon. During the opening sequence of the film, Braddock heads to Saigon to find his wife so he can get her out of the city. Intercut with this we see Braddock’s wife at their apartment, packing to leave. Mrs. Braddock gives her friend, or housemaid (it’s never made clear) one of her dresses and in thanks for this, the friend steals one of Mrs. Braddock’s bracelets. Mrs. Braddock leaves, the friend puts on the bracelet, and the apartment promptly explodes, killing the friend. Out in the panic-ridden streets, Mrs. Braddock has her embassy papers stolen. Braddock returns home, sees the dress and bracelet on the burned corpse of Mrs. Braddock’s friend, assumes his wife is dead, and leaves. Mrs. Braddock is refused entry to the embassy because she doesn’t have her papers and is lost in the turmoil as the embassy is rushed by desperate people looking to escape. Some of you may ask, ‘But what about in Missing In Action 2, where they were told the war was over and Braddock was told his wife would remarry?’ You’d be right to point this out, but as I mentioned when discussing Missing In Action, a film made at the same time as Missing In Action 2, showing Braddock escaping from a different POW camp, continuity across films was not the top priority. Norris had a specific story he wanted to tell and this was the setup he required to tell that story.
It sets the stage for Norris (and his brother, Aaron, who makes his directorial debut) to craft a layered story about an issue the US government was ignoring (it’s worth reading about the Amerasian kids who were left behind, ignored by both the Vietnamese and US governments. It’s potentially the darkest part of the Vietnam conflict). At least, that would be the case were it not a Cannon B-movie made for almost no money. The film first attempts to deal with politics in the ham-fisted way one would expect. After Braddock is informed his wife is still alive and he has a son, the CIA arrives to inform Braddock that the information is incorrect. Of course, this merely proves to Braddock that the information is true and leads to one of the great overlooked movie lines of all time. When the ‘LittleJohn’ character (played by Jack Rader) tells Braddock not to step on anyone’s toes, Braddock says ‘I don’t step on toes, I step on necks’ with a stone-cold performance by Norris.
Much like Missing In Action 2, the film doesn’t kick into gear until the final thirty or forty minutes. After his wife is killed, he and his son are kidnapped, then escape, only for all the Amerasian children to be taken prisoner by the big bad guy, General Quoc (Aki Aleong). It’s when Braddock arrives at the POW camp to rescue the children that the audience gets what it came to see, sadly it doesn’t happen until an hour in. It is however, one of the best Chuck Norris scenes ever put to celluoid when he stops the little girl from being raped by shooting a grenade into the would-be rapist’s stomach, propelling him out of the door, and then the grenade explodes inside him. Peak Norris. What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase across Vietnam to the Thai border that involves a helicopter chasing and trying to blow up a truck full of children, Norris stealing a plane, which promptly crashes, and then the final confrontation at the Thai border. The not-so-subtle attack on US foreign policy ignoring a larger problem for the sake of not enflaming past tensions during this conflict is terribly ham-fisted, yet feels perfect for the film. ‘LittleJohn’ waits for Braddock with the US Army at the Thai border, but refuses to let the Army cross to help Braddock out of fear it will reignite the war. A general even demands permission to cross and help, but ‘LittleJohn’ refuses. General Quoc arrives in Hind D helicopter to finish Braddock and the children, gleefully gloating that ‘the Americans will do nothing.’ The Americans don’t need to do anything, because the children have Chuck ‘fuckin’ Norris on their side. With the help of his son, the now wounded, Braddock fires a few well-placed shots at the helicopter and brings it down. Only then, as the Amerasian children carry their Christ-like saviour (Chuck Norris really does resemble the American portrayals of Jesus, and he is a devout Christian) across the bridge to Thailand, do the US Army do the right thing and rush to help.
There’s real potential for a serious, dramatic war story about the plight of Amerasian children. There may be one that I’m yet to see, if you know of one please do stick it in the comments. Unfortunately, the low-budget nature of Missing In Action 3 accompanied by Norris simply not being the right fit for that type of film, means the film doesn’t carry the heft it was intended to. Despite that, everyone involved gives it everything they have, but it’s no Apocalypse Now, no matter how much they want it to be.
There is an argument to be made that the disparity between the three films and their timelines suggests that Braddock is less a character with an arc and more a cipher for the American presence in Vietnam. He’s not an American soldier, he’s every American soldier fighting against the unjust outcomes of the war for those left behind and abandoned by the US Government. Sadly, with the budget constraints set out by Cannon, it’s likely that this isn’t the case. Chuck Norris may well have been outspoken about his views of the war, but Missing in Action is Cannon’s baby and given their stock in trade, it’s unlikely they thought about it this way.
A few years after watching Apocalypse Now Redux, I had to watch the original Apocalypse Now for one of my modules at university. I was not looking forward to it and went to ask my lecturer if I could skip the screening. My logic was that I had seen the film and didn’t want to sit through it again. My lecturer was shocked that one of his students felt that way and urged me to explain. It soon became clear that I had only seen the Redux version, he assured me that the original cut was far shorter and told me he expected me at the screening. I begrudgingly accepted and promised to be there. Much to my surprise, I loved the original cut of Apocalypse Now. It turns out that Coppola, unlike America in the actual conflict, got it right the first time.
References:
Narrative Patterns and Mythic Trajectories in Mid-1980s Vietnam Movies by Tony Williams, found in Inventing Vietnam by Michael Anderegg (Ed).
Black Liberation and the Vietnam War - https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/vietnam-war-50th-anniversary-commemoration