Posted: 02/08/2011

Missing in Action 2: The Beginning Review

by Robert Baum

Review: Missing in Action 2: The Beginning (1985)

Chuck Norris returns, or rather begins, as Colonel James Braddock in the prequel to last year’s Missing in Action. The producers deemed that release to be more worthy of being seen first. Well perhaps that might mean Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the producers of both films (along with recent efforts starring Charles Bronson, martial artisans, and breakdancers; in short, the usual product of the low-budget cinematic entity of Cannon Films). This year marks the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Hardly a good reason to book Missing in Action 2: The Beginning into theatres but they’re probably looking to get a jump on ticket sales before the eagerly anticipated return of Sylvester Stallone this May in Rambo: First Blood Part II.
The film begins with Braddock and a few servicemen hastily exiting a chopper, but with good reason, as the craft’s has taken heavy fire from enemy forces. Flash forward several years where the survivors attempt to keep their morale up; and endure the hell of a prisoner of war camp and its iron-willed commandant Colonel Yin (Soon Teck-Oh, probably best known for portraying James Bond’s Hong Kong Secret Service colleague in 1974s The Man with the Golden Gun). In the camp, the prisoners deal with isolation from loved ones, battling malaria, random torture, and seeing escapees experience freedom—albeit short-lived thanks to booby traps the inmates are clueless to find, until they wind up being gored or flame throwered, in one of the film’s gruesome sequences. There is no shortage of such scenes in Lance Hool’s film, a step down from Joseph Zito’s 1984 effort.
While many real-life vets are plagued by horrific memories of fighting in Southeast Asia, this film hardly seems the proper panacea for them and the families of those who never returned. Though for a brief time those survivors might find this escapism to be a useful investment at the box office and just over an hour and a half of their time. Still any thought that Cannon might have of achieving artistic greatness with Missing in Action 2: The Beginning, is more of a grand delusion than a grand illusion.

Robert Baum is Currently a Bryn Mawr, PA-based film afficanado and pop culture junkie.

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