The year is 1988 and due to some questionable mismanagement that would make Jack and his handful of beans wince, producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were beginning to find that the good ship Cannon was struggling to stay afloat. Who could they possibly go to to reverse their flagging fortunes? Who on their books had the ability and the raw star power to put an entire studio into the black? Who could save them?
The answer – in the long run – was nobody, but that didn’t stop them from convincing a sceptical Chuck Norris to return to the ‘Nam-ccentric Missing In Action franchise in order to try and turn things around.
Letting Chuck take control of the plot and letting Chuck’s brother, Aaron Norris, direct this third chapter in the life of Colonal James Braddock, Cannon crossed their fingers and hoped for the best – but it seems that even the demigod persona of Norris could stop the studio’s inevitable slide into disaster.
It’s 1975 and Colonal James Braddock looks on impassively as the Fall of Saigon unfolds all around him as he searches for his interpreter wife, Lin Tan – which is kinda weird when you consider that the previous two movies had his bachelor-ass uncomfortably nestled in a Vietnamese POW camp at the same time. Anyway, franchise inconsistencies aside, Braddock believes Lin has perished when a mortar turns their apartment to splinters, but unbeknownst to him, a mix up has occured and Lin is still alive but is stranded when the U.S. forces withdraw.
Twelve years pass and one day, out of the blue, Braddock is approached by missionary Reverend Polanski who not only rocks Braddock with the news that Lin is still alive, but he also has a twelve year old son named Van Tan Chang. Braddock initially doesn’t believe it, but after the CIA randomly show up out of nowhere and inform him that the revelation is nothing more than a steaming pile of bullcrap, Braddock knows that his spouse is still trapped in Vietnam.
Doing what he does whenever he hears that anyone is still trapped in Vietnam, Braddock ropes in a sleazy war buddy to hook him up with a flight, a super-hot and an unfeasibly huge gun in order to once again infiltrate the country and after a short search, our hero finally finds his wife and an unsurprisingly bitter son.
However, their touching reunion is short lived when the troops of the spiteful General Quoc crash the party, blow Lin’s brains out and take our hero and his kid away to be tortured. But one thing that Quoc hasn’t counted on is that being brutalised in a Vietcong camp is just another weekday to Braddock and after escaping he plans to get Van back to the States. However, they won’t be going along as he also has to transport dozens of other, orphaned and stranded Amerasian children to safety too like some thrust kicking, neck snapping crossing guard.
While Braddock: Missing In Action III failed to save Cannon from going down like a stripper nicknamed the Hindenburg, I would have to debate that it’s by far the most polished of the three Braddock adventures that Norris filmed. While Norris’ brother, was chosen over a return of the first film’s director screams nepotism, Aaron Norris actually has a slick style that depicts all Norris’ action antics cleanly and concisely in a way the earlier movies didn’t. So does that make part III the best of the bunch? Well, it’s sort of hard to say, because despite its more polished looks, Braddock is almost a carbon copy of the first film only with whimpering children swapped out with shivering prisoners of war. Aside from that, it’s pretty much business as usual as we start with a (admittedly well mounted) flashback to the war that then sees a determined Braddock hook up with an old, cap wearing, sleazoid buddy; boat illegally into the trouble zone; get captured; escape and rain hell upon a sadistic general who has a hard-on for admitted he’s a war criminal. It’s all textbook stuff and considering its themes were considered fairly dated back in ’88, spending yet more time with a man who has killed more Vietnamese than Typhoon Haiphong as he dramatically ups his bodycount may be a bit much for modern audiences.
On the other hand, those who are into 80s cinematic cheese that’s stronger than stilton will undoubtedly find much to chuckle about, probably starting with the movie being sandwiched between a couple of toe curlingly patriotic power ballads. The movie unleashes more than it’s fair share of ridiculous action fuckery that plays more like an Itchy and Scratchy episode than a serious movie and in the midst of it all stands the Lone Wolf himself as rigid and immovable as ever. Whether it’s “reacting” to his wife’s supposed death with all the emotion of a man trying to vainly remember the last three digits of his phone number or spouting out deranged poetry like “I dont step on toes. I step on necks.”, Norris works overtime to show why he’s the most endearing plank of wood in action cinema. While I’m assuming moments like Braddock insisting that a band of children slog through ninety kilometres of sweltering Vietnamese jungle barefoot, were supposed to be inspiring, there’s more chance of you guffawing your way through like a honking donkey. Elsewhere, Braddock proves to be something of an action diva as he dives through a plate glass window while machine gunning everyone in the room and then – just to be extra – he leaves by diving out another window for seemingly no other reason other than the production probably over ordered breakaway glass to spare. However, its his magnificently 80s treatment of a random nonce that pushes things over the top as the movie pays off an uncomfortably long groping scene by having Braddock stab him with a knife attachment from his swiss army M-15 and fire a grenade directly into his stomach, which then promptly explodes after a perfectly timed pause.
Add to this a typically sinister villain who is so desperate to murderlize our hero, he screams “You’re finished Braddock! I’ve won!” after getting the drop on him with a helicopter despite them having only met barely twelve hours prior and a son who initially hates his absentee father so much he will only address him by venomously adding the word “BRADDOCK” to every sentence. However, they ultimately bond in only a way Chuck Norris and a child can – by having his son aim for him while he shoots down the bad guy’s chopper and it’s exactly this type of hilarious shit that makes Braddock’s final outing perfect for fans of gleefully dumb action.
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