Delta Force One - The Lost Patrol

With a small handful of exceptions, I’ve found that most movies with the word Force in the title are practically guaranteed to suck. Delta Force One: The Lost Patrol is no different.

In looking up this movie on IMDb, I found that there are several different series of movies that use ‘Delta Force’ in the title. First, you have The Delta Force, which starred Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin and wasn’t that awful of a movie. Next, there Operation Delta Force, which had about as many sequels as the Police Academy movies, and were just about as good. I caught part 3 or 4 one night on HBO and laughed my through most of it. This movie was produced in 1999, and I’m really hoping it won’t be the start of a new series.

The movie begins with some soldiers riding through the desert in some kind of Jeep, and they encounter a bunch of Arabs in the desert crying over a dead camel. When the soldiers approach to help drag the thing off the road, the Arabs attack them. One of them even has a huge machine gun mounted on a swivel turret, and that turret is (and I’m sooooo not kidding) mounted on the back of his friggin’ CAMEL. That’s just awesome. As unoriginal and lame as this movie was, I have to give it major credit for somebody figuring out how to attach a machine gun to the back of a saddle and then putting it on a camel. Hell yeah.

So after the guys in the first Jeep get shot and blown up, a small convoy of guys driving the same exact Jeep go looking for them. Along the way, they are fired upon from the worst shots in the history of the world, and of course the good guys never get a scratch on them. There’s also a subplot about a nuke-you-lure weapon, but I think that just gave the guys a reason to quit getting shot at in the Jeep so they could get out on foot and get shot at in an underground bunker.

Rather than try to break down the really bad action sequences in this movie, I will present to you a scenario depicted in the film and then explain how they got out of it. The scenario is a mine field, and the guys are being shot at while driving through the mines. For some reason, the bad guys actually stop shooting when they realize that the good guys noticed the mines. So, what do these brave young brilliant minds decide is the best way out of this scenario? The answer, which was a direct order from the chisel-jawed blonde guy, was to ‘punch it’. That’s right, in whatever parallel universe this movie takes place, land mines aren’t a problem if you drive over them fast enough. I bet Rambo never would have thoughtof that.

The star of this movie is British actor Gary Daniels, who has several dozen B-grade action movies to his credit. I’ve never seen him before this movie. Other cast members include Mike Norris, who is – oh yes – the son of Chuck Norris, though they hardly look anything alike. The other main good guy is the grandson of famed actor Robert Mitchum. Would you believe that John Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf in Lord of the Rings, also appears as sort of a villain. Rhys-Davies did LOTR and had a small role in the Indiana Jones movies, but just about everything else he’s done is B-grade junk.

As dumb as this movie was, it’s actually worth seeing the final parts before the credits because it explains what happened to each of the main characters after the story ends. These parts were hilarious in how they basically made fun of each character. The movie takes itself pretty seriously all the way until this part, but I still appreciated the laugh at the end. Don’t waste your time on this.