I appreciated the quick start to the film (because it seems that many films that were made before the twenty-first century tend to start slow as a way to introduce the audience to the characters and the story before actually jumping into everything). It appeared that the purpose of the opening scene was simply to show how much of a badass Chuck Norris’ Major Scott McCoy was and would be throughout the film. I thought that showing Scott McCoy carrying a man from a burning building at the start of the film was an effective way to show his worth and his strength (both mental and physical). However, I felt that after this first scene, McCoy seemed significantly less important. This idea was reflected in the fact that McCoy wasn’t around too much after the first scene. I found it interesting that from that point until almost the forty-five minute mark, Scott McCoy had very few, if any, speaking lines; McCoy was only shown on screen once or twice during that span. It was strange for the main character to go on such a lengthy hiatus during the first half of the film. I thought that this film was full of flaws and that, due to these flaws, the film suffered greatly. The biggest issue that I had with the film was the terrorists and their personalities. They were far too empathetic and personable to appear to be any sort of threat in the eyes of the audience. The fact that they seemed to care about certain people on board the plane and chose, on numerous occasions, not to kill passengers that were a threat to them made them less intimidating and far less interesting than they could have been. What made Robert Forster’s Abdul and David Menachem’s Mustafa was the fact that they never fully explained why they did anything and the only person that actually suffered from the two hijacking the plane was Charles Grant’s Tom Hale. Ultimately, no other person on the airplane suffered anything except for emotional distress. The Delta Force theme song was so overused and used in so many inappropriate situations that made the song appear nothing short of ironic that it essentially served no purpose (and lost all meaning) when it was used at the proper time. There was too much dialogue that should have been left out, there were numerous choices made by some of the main characters that essentially ruined the story and the horrible overuse of explosives actually made the action scenes quite dull. While the story wasn’t terrible, it was the issues that I listed above that made the film nearly unbearable. One of my least favorite parts of the film was Hanna Schygulla’s Ingrid. Her acting was some of the worst I had ever seen and because of acting I struggled to figure out her allegiance; the looks she gave to the terrorists throughout the film let me to believe that she was working alongside them. Giving the looks that she did and making the comments she made, leading the audience to believe that she was going to be a part of the hijacking, ended up being the fact that her acting was subpar. Ninety percent of the film contained the issues that I previously mentioned and really made the film difficult to appreciate. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090927/?ref_=ttmi_tt
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