Missing in Action (1984)

Missing in Action arrived in 1984 as the Cannon Group's opening bid in a small arms race with Rambo, and it conducts its business with the efficiency of a supply drop. Chuck Norris plays Colonel James Braddock, a man who escaped a North Vietnamese prison camp a decade earlier and now returns to finish the paperwork, which is to say he returns to shoot people and bring home prisoners the government has misplaced. The plot is a straight line. The dialogue is sparse. The helicopter does most of the emotional labor.

The film's politics belong to the Reagan years, a flag-waving, anti-bureaucratic strain that treats Washington as an obstacle and the jungle as a filing cabinet of unfinished business. Vietnamese characters are drawn as sadistic brutes, and reviewers at the time reached for words like xenophobic. None of this registers on the modern progressive scale. There is no inclusive casting design, no queer presence, no feminist viewpoint, and the women who appear are largely decorative fixtures of Bangkok nightlife. Climate anxiety, wealth critique, body positivity, and neurodivergence are absent entirely. The film has no interest in any of them.

Its distortions of history are real. They serve a patriotic fantasy, not a progressive revision of the record. The message arrives through fists, firepower, and a triumphant Saigon conference, never through sermonizing. The result is a lean, jingoistic B-picture that became a hit and spawned two more. On the markers of contemporary cultural awareness, it is a clean sheet. Zero. The sommelier finds nothing in the glass but gasoline.