A third Delta Force film? You know it!

The plot in this one is pretty simple – a Middle Eastern terrorist has gotten his hands on a nuclear device and he plans to smuggle it into the United States where he'll use it to blow lots of stuff up. To make sure that this doesn't happen, the American government sends in The Delta Force (a crack commando unit) who team up with some Russians to saunter on into whatever Middle Eastern country he's holed himself up in to take the bad guy down. Along the way, many of his over anxious followers try to stop them and generally wreak havoc with their plan.

Schmulik 'Sam' Firstenberg holds a special place in many b-movie fan's cold, clammy hearts. He's not only the genius who directed American Ninja but he also brought us such classics as Ninja III: The Domination and Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo. He made Michael Dudikoff and Sho Kosugi (and David Bradley… to a lesser extent) stars and the Polish born director was on of the Golan-Globus/Cannon Films 'go to guys' for a good ten years or so. Interestingly enough (or maybe not, depending on your tastes) this one was written by Boaz Davidson (who directed the teen comedy The Last American Virgin and has since gone on to produce a whole batch of Hollywood genre film remakes) and Andrew Dutch (who wrote the Aaron Norris Michael Dudikoff vehicle, Platoon Leader).

After a helicopter crash killed a few people on the set of 1990's Delta Force II: Operation Stranglehold a year before, superstar Chuck Norris didn't want to return to the role of rocket shooting, motorcycle riding, headband wearing commando Major Scott McCoy and with Lee Marvin dead, there was really no point in trying to tie into any continuity to the first two films in the series. With that problem out of the way, Cannon films decided, 'hey, why not just bring in all new characters and instead of having a legitimate movie star in the cast, why not put the sons and or brothers of a few famous people in the lead roles instead?' An interesting marketing plan to be sure, but check out the credits for this one – Eric Douglas, Mike Norris, Nick Cassavetes, and Matthew Penn make up the core of the group proving that yeah, they really weren't kidding.

The end result, at least in terms of the performances? Rather unremarkable, actually. No one is all that bad in it, but neither is anyone all that good. The 'relatives of famous people' get the job done and do just fine with the rather cliché ridden material that they've been given to work with, but don't expect any star making performances here – it's not going to happen. What the film does do well though, is blow stuff up and kill off bit part characters and extras. There are some great shoot outs, lots of explosions, and some deliciously extravagant violence scattered throughout the film. Plenty of Arab stereotypes get shot up, there are a couple of completely unnecessary subplots, and it all happens very quickly. What we're left with is a decent time killer, a fun b-movie in the grand Cannon films tradition that doesn't make a ton of sense nor does it need to. The lack of a notable lead performer like Norris doesn't help things at all and you could say that watching a cast of relative unknowns even hurts the film a bit, but there's still enough completely brainless violence and action to keep it all moving along nicely and the movie, in its defense, is never boring – even if its never remarkable in any way, shape or form.

The DVD

Video:

Delta Force 3 gets a 1.33.1 fullframe transfer which suits the movie just fine as it looks to be its original aspect ratio, not surprising considering this one went straight to video. The colors look okay and the black levels aren't half bad but Warner Brothers obviously didn't put any real effort into sprucing up the image at all as there is some fairly heavy grain and a little bit of softness to the picture. Overall though, everything is perfectly watchable, just don't go into this expecting a reference quality transfer cause that ain't what this release is all about. Edge enhancement and mpeg compression aren't a big problem, but the lack of serious detail in the image is a little off putting at times. Like the other films in the recent batch of Cannon/Warner Brothers DVD releases, things could have been worse, but they sure could have been a lot better.