Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988)

It's 1975 the fall of Saigon. Colonel James Braddock (Chuck Norris) is one of the last at the embassy. His apartment gets hit and he mistakenly assumes his wife Lin is killed. Lin arrives after her papers get stolen. Chaos ensues. Braddock gets shot and Lin is left behind. It's the present day and Rev. Polanski arrives from Vietnam with news that his wife is alive with his son. Little John from the CIA denies the story at first which only confirms it for Braddock. He goes to Bangkok but Little John tries to stop him. He manages to escape and Mik flies him away. He parachutes into Vietnam and finds an orphanage filled with American-Asian children left behind after the war. He tries to escape with his family but they are captured by Gen. Quoc.The problem is that Chuck Norris is always so sincere which doesn't fit the ridiculousness of the story. He never quite got the Rambo feel and his movies are never good enough to be realistic. This exists in the neverworld between good camp and good action. It fails as both. Norris is a horrible actor and the clunky dialog doesn't help any of the actors. The movie drags when it runs out of action. For too much of the movie, it really drags.

Chuck finds out the Vietnamese wife he thought was dead has been alive all these years and has a 12 year-old son that is half-Chuck. So Chuck does what he does best and goes back into 'Nam to rescue his wife and son. What the hell, while he's at it, might as well rescue a bunch of other Amerasian orphans as well.Least of the MIA series but still watchable for Chuck fans. The action is solid old school Cannon stuff. I'm a fan but not everybody is. I doubt you're watching this by choice unless you are a fan, though. As with the other MIA films, and I suppose Chuck movies in general, this one generates a lot of hate for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the quality of the movie itself. Directorial debut of Aaron Norris. Look for Keith David in a cameo near the beginning.

It's been a long time since I've laughed so hard at a movie. In the last ten minutes Chuck Norris takes on a soldier kungfu style, then survives a grenade that blows up at his feet and takes on a helicopter. All the while these retarded soldiers are watching and claiming they can't cross the border... even though they do as soon as the bady is killed.Oh yeah, and what about that soldier who keeps spouting "I kill you!". Man oh man.I recommend this only to people who are entertained by the "it's so bad it's good" genre.

Rounding out my Chuck Norris Triple Feature DVD, we have "Braddock: Missing in Action III," undoubtedly the best in the series and probably the only 80s action movie to come anywhere near "Commando" in terms of awesomeness. Here Chuck discovers that his wife and son are still alive under Communist rule in Vietnam, but the CIA is wary of letting him go there, most likely because the last time they asked him to accompany them there, he almost restarted the war. Chuck of course scoffs at this and leaves anyway ("Don't step on any toes, Braddock." "I don't step on toes, Little John--I STEP ON NECKS.") For some reason, upon his return to Saigon, it turns out the Vietnamese military generals still want him dead for his war crimes. The same war crimes that had him imprisoned in a POW camp for 10 years! They just cannot let this go! By the series timeline, this means that the Vietnamese government has been holding a grudge against this one particular guy for almost 20 years (what did he do, exactly? Raze a village?).Once a Colonel Quoc gets wind of Chuck's presence, he ambushes Chuck, shoots his wife, and attempts to torture him and his son. Chuck escapes. This angers Quoc so much that he decides to kidnap about 40 random children out of spite. He takes the kids to a base and locks them up for God knows what purpose, and one of his soldiers attempts to rape an 8-year-old girl. Fortunately, Chuck ambushes him and implants a bomb in his stomach and his entire body explodes right in front of the girl. Hats off to Chuck for saving her from a traumatizing experience. Then he completely wipes out the base in about fifteen minutes, and packs all the kids into a truck for a quick getaway while being pursued by a helicopter. Here is the movie's only true dip in logic, as the helicopter fires rockets at them and Chuck drives the truck through enormous flames multiple times and the kids inside are somehow not roasted alive. But that detail is a small price to pay for the levels of excitement throughout the movie. It has three times as much action as the previous installments and some convincing scenes of total chaos, as well as Chuck doing somersaults through windows even though there are doors available, all combining for a hearty 10/10. See it.