Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
As it must to all men, death has come to Chuck Norris, age 86. In reviving old pieces for this Seasoned Ticket column, my impulse comes from my own lifelong interest in going back and reading about how movies were received in the moment they came out, without the gloss of intervening years of conventional wisdom or settled debate. (I was the kind of student who would go through hardbound collections of Time and Life magazine in the library to read reviews from 1960, etc.)
So, I offer two ancient pieces drawn from Norris's flabbergasting run in the 1980s, when he was a bankable and prolific star of the stoniest brand of patriotic action thriller, the kinds of movies that gave birth to a million Pete Hegseths. I saw and wrote about most of these, and include here reviews of Invasion U.S.A. and Braddock: Missing in Action III, published in The Herald in 1985 and 1988, respectively.
Invasion U.S.A.
Those pesky Russians are at it again—you'd think they'd learned from Red Dawn that you can't invade these United States and expect to get away with it. But, sure enough, that's exactly what they try in the flammably titled Invasion U.S.A.
Actually, this film is reluctant to pin the source of the invasion directly on the Soviet government. The invasion force actually seems to be a KGB-inspired mercenary effort, launched at Miami from Cuba—sort of a Bay of Pigs in reverse.
The big problem with these Russians, who are led by a vodka-swigging psycho named Rostov, is that they chose a city that happens to be the home of Chuck Norris, former martial-arts champion and latest two-fisted, low-budget pretender to Clint Eastwood's throne.
Chuck is living a peaceful existence in the Everglades, hog-tying alligators and watching the sweat form on his brow, when the invaders hit. He's particularly miffed because this fellow Rostov is an old nemesis from Chuck's former life as a spy, or a CIA agent, or whatever he was (the movie likes mysteriousness). When the scarlet horde moves ashore and starts attacking school buses, churches and (the unthinkable) a shopping mall, Chuck leaps into action and machine-guns 'em all away.
There should be enough carnage here to satisfy hard-core Norrisphiles, although the picture is a comedown after last spring's Code of Silence, which was actually a pretty good action movie. It gets off to a slow start and, except for the shoot-out in the shopping mall, has some dead patches.
This is Chuck's fourth film in the last 12 months, and he shows no signs of stopping—he even found time to co-write the screenplay to Invasion U.S.A. That his productivity is so high will either be welcome or depressing news, depending on your enthusiasm for his brand of entertainment. One thing is sure: It can't be good news for enemies of the free world.
Braddock: Missing in Action III
The Missing in Action films have given Chuck Norris his brawniest character (and his steadiest work): James Braddock, the ex-Vietnam vet who keeps returning to Vietnam, mowing down Communists, and bringing innocents back. Braddock: Missing in Action III adds a new element to the series.
A prologue, set in 1975, informs us that Braddock had a Vietnamese wife. (This fact, as far as I can remember, was hitherto unmentioned in the series.) At the time of the American withdrawal from Saigon, Braddock thought his wife had been killed, and he left without her. Twelve years later, he learns that, not only is his wife alive, but she was also pregnant at the time of their parting. She has since given birth to a son.
Devotees of Norris's cinema will have already guessed that he hops the first plane to Bangkok and finds a way to cross the border into Vietnam, but getting his wife and son out proves harder than getting in. The obstacles include an unexpected truckload of kids (they must be evacuated too), sadistic torture, and seemingly hundreds of enemy soldiers. All of the latter are blown to smithereens.
MIA III is no better or worse than the preceding films in the series. The Saigon prologue works up some convincing panic, even if most of it is stolen from The Killing Fields. On the whole Aaron Norris directs will full-bore simplicity, though the film contains no killer effects such as the burlap bag full of live rats that was tied around Chuck's head in MIA II.
Someday some film student is going to write a dissertation about the Missing in Action films. In some unconscious ways, despite themselves, these are interesting movies—the way in which, for instance, Braddock's existence in the United States is absolutely perfunctory, as though he were alive only to relive the war experience. If some veterans keep returning to Vietnam psychologically, Braddock actually acts out the return and, to paraphrase Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, this time we win.
At this point Braddock's invincibility has gone beyond ludicrousness. He's a superhero who doesn't even bother dodging bullets; they magically avoid him. It's another level of wish-fulfillment at work in these films, and like most superhero stories, it's effective.
I should've name-checked the actor who played Rostov in Invasion, the formidable Richard Lynch. And you can see how Norris had made his mark from my comment where I wistfully note that MIA III has no bravura scene like Norris's head being placed in a bag of live rats, as in the previous film. May he rest in peace.
March 20, 2026
