Anyone who thought that the noughties era of endless, direct to DVD sequels that no one had ever asked for were solely a matter for the horror genre, I’m afraid to say there are plenty of other types of movies that milked a weakening IP to within an inch of their lives. For every Tremors there was a Marine, for every one new Wrong Turn there were two installments of Sniper and possibly most confounding of all is that Behind Enemy Lines managed to wring three sequels out of a fairly decent military actioner.
For anyone who needs reminding, Behind Enemy Lines saw Owen Wilson (yes, that Owen Wilson) experiencing the titular peril in Bosnia while Gene Hackman (yes, that Gene Hackman) grumbled with his superiors to bring his boy home. Of course both of these actors are totally non-conspicuous by their absence as the follow-ups unsurprisingly took a more “spiritual sequel” route and featured a budget that probably wouldn’t have even covered Wilson and Hackman’s fee.
There’s trouble afoot in North Korea. After a passing satellite has spotted something that looks worryingly like a three-stage Topol intercontinental ballistic missile complete with a nuclear weapon on tow, the White House immediately snaps into panic mode as the usual parade of generals and specialists start hurling options at President Adair T. Manning. In an attempt to avoid Kim Jong-il casually wiping up a sizable chunk of the U.S. on a whim, a team of Navy SEALs is flown out to sabotage the facility before any harm can be done.
However, at zero hour, new information is obtained that requires the mission to be aborted, but wouldn’t you know it, two guys have already jumped and while a third, Lieutenant Robert James, manages to stop himself, a freak accident sees him thrown from the plane and into the enemy’s back yard. In a effort to save his friends, gung ho Master Chief Neil T. “Spaz” Callaghan lives up to his nickname by disobeying a direct order and hurling himself out into the night sky himself and soon all four men find themselves deep in Korean shit with no mission to carry out and no rescue in their foreseeable future. Matters get even more grim when the SEALs are spotted by North Korean troops, trounced in a gun battle and promptly tortured for their efforts.
The White House is apoplectic and as more scenarios are pitched left and right, pissed looking representatives from South Korea show up to point out that this massive dumpster fire of a situation is going to have a massively negative effect if things don’t get un-fucked, pronto.
It seems that the only option that isn’t going to leave thousands dead is if the surviving members of James’ group can free themselves and take out that missile up close and personal.
If you were to point a nuclear missile at my head and forced me to give the devil his due, I’d have to admit that Behind Enemy Lines II is far less unwatchable that I was expecting it to be, but that doesn’t mean the film isn’t a massive waste of time that consumes ninety minutes of your life that could have been spent doing something more productive – like laundry. However, I do confess, a major reason I paid so much attention to this bone headed military flick is that I was curious to where exactly they’d have to cut corners. For example, while the notion that Navy SEALs would parachute out of a commandeered passenger plane in order to remain undetected from the North Koreans feels like something that is completely feasible, you also get the feeling that it’s far cheaper to bang up a replica of the interior of a passenger plane than it is a military one and it just looks weird. I mean, if you’ve tricked out the boarding steps to allow soldiers to hurl themselves out of it, why would you leave all the seats still in it? It’s a fucking nightmare trying to edge down the aisle of a plane under normal circumstances when trying to get to the loo, why are you expecting SEALs it manage it with a shit-load of gear on including weapons, parachutes and a big, hefty radio?
Elsewhere, we’re treated to gunfights where the muzzle flashes and ricochetting stray shots are obviously digitised and the action scenes have no sense of geography other than having people take cover and fire wildly like a particularly aggressive game of paintball.
But the real noticable act of corner cutting is that director James Dodson seems to have spiked his editor’s latte with enough speed to make a dead body jitterbug like 20’000 volts was running through it. Yes, we’re all painfully familiar with that twitchy, strobey, music video editing style that was irritatingly prevalent in the 2000s, but Behind Enemy Lines II features such frantic cutting tricks as sudden freeze frames, sped up footage, slowed down footage, overlayed footage and migraine triggering jump cuts, that not one single scene is allowed to play out without making the editing in Ang Lee’s Hulk look as restrained as an episode of the Golden Girls. In fact, I’d suggest that if you have to watch this film, don’t watch it on a tablet as the frenetic cutting genuinely made be believe my WiFi had gone down on four separate occasions. At best, it’s super annoying – at worst it makes the action scenes completely impenetrable and adding to the sense of growing frustration is that all the SEALs are such cardboard cutouts, you can’t really tell them apart even after half of them have been shot.
However, I will say that even though the action stuff veers from confusing to downright hilarious (at one point our heroes use a jeep to outrun an explosion that’s literally big enough to be seen from space), I have to throw up a stiff, crisp salute to whomever was in charge of casting, because while the SEALs are as interchangeable as shop mannequins, the supporting cast is stacked with a fairly impressive array of aging character actors. We have Peter Coyote as the President, Bruce McGill as a hard handed General, Ben Cross as a hard nosed commander and the ever-dependable Glenn Morshower who seems to be included in these types of movies by law by now. However, most amusing of all is that the ubiquitous Keith David and that marvellous deep-ass voice of his is present in flashbacks as a training officer. Why is this amusing? Well, it’s only fitting considering the first film contained David Keith and it feels like bad movie kismet that these guys have both appeared in the same franchise.
However, while Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis Of Evil is a fairly standard poster boy for unnecessary sequels, the film has a genuine, final shock in store thanks to its end credits. It seems that the whole film is a fabricated, utterly made-up musing about what could have caused the mysterious explosion in Ryanggang in 2004 that saw a large, unexplained mushroom cloud rise into the air that was amusingly explained away by North Korea as a strange “cloud formation”. While the first film got into trouble loosely adapting true events, you have to give the sequel props for the balls of taking a mysterious happenstance and attributing it to Americans wandering in and blowing shit up…
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