Cast:
Chuck Norris (Colonel James Thomas Braddock), Aki Aleong (General Quoc), Roland Harrah III (Van Tan Cang), Yehuda Efroni (Reverend Polanski), Floyd Levine (General Duncan), Miki Kim (Lin Tan Cang), Ron Barker ("Mik" Mikalchek), Jack Rader (CIA Agent Littlejohn), and Keith David (Embassy Gate Captain) Directed by Aaron Norris.
Review:
We've done this song and dance before. I try to have a bit of historical context with what Norris was doing being in a film like this, I try to wonder if I will find a Norris performance that actually evokes something besides doing a few kicks/shooting bullets and not really much else. You might think, isn't that a bit too derisive? No, because I've had plenty of fun with movies involving Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, and in the same year that Braddock: Missing in Action III was released, audiences believed there was a rising action star with Steven Seagal in Above the Law. Where was I? Oh, Braddock. Around this era, at one point in time, Norris was apparently was on top of the video market for action stars. It was the 15th feature film with Norris as the leading star and the first of his two films released that year, with Hero and the Terror coming out seven months later in August that were both distributed by Cannon Pictures; Norris wrote the film with James Bruner. You might wonder what "Amerasians" are that the film is about. Well, it is a term (with its type of double-edged sword along with other terms such as "war babies" and "G.I. babies") that refers to people born in Eastern parts of Asia that had a U.S. military father that happened to be around in the regions of say, Okinawa, South Korea, Vietnam, or the Philippines (the latter country once had over 20 U.S. bases for most of the 20th century). Coincidentally, 1988 was the same year that Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act that allowed Amerasians born between 1962-1976 to apply for immigrant visas for the next four years (children and now their parent, could emigrate). The film was filmed in the Philippines (the irony); during production, four officers (military and police) were killed in a helicopter accident. At the time of its release, Norris believed that this was the best work he had done up until that point (I chuckle at hearing that as someone who hasn't seen Code of Silence [1985] or The Delta Force [1985]). The movie was not a major success with audiences, with Norris accusing Cannon of not doing proper marketing for the movie. Norris was not particularly happy with Cannon, but he kept being around them up until the latter went down the tubes by the time of Hellbound (1994).
You might remember that the second film had him deal with Braddock being thought to be dead by his wife in the second film. Now he is shown to have a wife in 1975 around the fall of Saigon. This happened to be the first feature film directed by Aaron Norris, who had gone from stuntman in the 1970s to associate producer in the next decade, and I'm sure he got to direct the film without any consideration from his older brother (they then worked together on five further theatrical films).* Well, actually he was the one who brought up the whole Amerasian thing to his brother and he was chosen when Joseph Zito* and Jack Smight each fell through. You could make the concession that "oh golly gee, what do you expect from an 80s action movie?" But this movie is just the same lame mediocrity that was present in the last two movies; well, less so with the first film, which at least had time for James Hong and M. Emmet Walsh to show up (the second had Steven Williams*). All you get here is a goofy Australian for all of five minutes and...not much else to offer (okay if you pay attention, you can see a young Keith David). Norris can say lines such as "I don't step on toes, I step on necks" all he wants, but he either can't or won't make scenes involving emotional investment actually matter beyond being a hack's vision of what they think a Clint Eastwood action movie is. Maybe it would make a weird double-header with the other 1988 rescue mission movie Rambo III.
It may interest you to know that Aleong (born in Trinidad and Tobago but moved to Brooklyn when he was 15) was a character actor for over 100 movies before he died in 2025. That is as nice as I can be for a movie that does him no favors besides a middling torture scene (at a certain point, this just seems like someone trying to do horror with the whole "lose balance and they die") and him just going "Braddock!". The one amusing sequence is a part where Braddock is told by a reverend that his wife is alive only to immediately be told by a CIA guy to not trust that guy's info...which just makes Braddock believe the reverend even harder. You get the usual type of dreary moments in the jungle and the inevitable rush to stand on one's feet rather than bend the knee (whether that involves driving the kids and the reverend to tough it out in the jungle or, well, finding a pervert groping a child and deciding to stab and then fire a grenade in said man). I especially love that the climax features everyone just watching as father and son come together in the only way possible: aiming the gun to shoot the perfect shot to kill the helicopter pilot (and also the general). As a whole, Braddock: Missing in Action III is mediocre stuff that does nobody any type of favors even with inklings of an interesting story and the occasional flourish of energy to cap out a middling trilogy.
Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.
*Actually, he directed just one film without his brother as the star: Platoon Leader in 1988 that had Michael Dudikoff as the star. With a name like that, maybe I should do a Dudikoff Week just for the hell of it.
*What, no love for X?
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