Who payed the critics

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Instant Favorite.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

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.

This is the third installment of the Missing in Action series, and it doesn't disappoint.Chuck, uh, I mean Braddock goes to extricate his wife and his son that he thought were dead in Viet Nam.Golan Globus Production was like the Asylum Pictures of today, making spoofs of other hit A List movies. This movie that started out as Rambo mimic grew into its own franchise that has personality all its own. Also Golan-Globus' quality started to go up around the mid '80s, and in its wake, this turned out to be a high quality action movie.Chuck Norris never looked better as Col. Braddock, and his actions ranks up there with other A list movies. He could have done more wholesale destruction, but he did enough.There's some inequity in this movie that the Vietnamese really didn't deserve to be killed the way they did, since asides from being A holes, they were only doing their job within their own country. But we all want to see justice served Chuck Norris style.Clean to the very end, this is one gem of Chuck Norris film.

By combining the topical bent that remained a constant thread throughout the Missing In Action series with increased firepower and nearly unceasing action, this final segment of the trilogy may very well be the strongest of the bunch.The story deviates slightly from the POW focus found in the first two Missing In Action entries, and Braddock's impetus this time is his learning that the wife he thought was dead and the son he didn't know he had are sequestered within hostile territory in Vietnam. After being dismissed by interloping and incompetent CIA brass, Chuck designates himself a one-man infiltration squad and returns to the war-torn land to bring his family home.The nefarious General Quoc proves to be Braddock's most sadistic nemesis yet, and when our oft-abused hero's wife is murdered, his mission turns into a quest for vengeance. Captured by Quoc, Braddock and his son are subjected to a particularly harrowing bit of combined torture before escaping the enemy stockade, soon after which Chuck's son is caught yet again, thus setting the stage for Braddock's return to free his boy and launch the explosive bloodbath implied by the MIA moniker.Though ample time is spent developing the story, this installment of the franchise packs more action into the proceedings than either of the two films before it. The body count is likewise elevated, and Chuck spends a good chunk of the movie mowing down anyone wearing a Vietnamese military uniform with a variety of weapons. By far the coolest of the lot is a tri-barrelled assault rife that houses a machine gun, a revolving grenade launcher, and a nasty-looking bayonet, all used to great effect in a scene which features a would-be rapist being knifed in the chest and having an explosive canister burrowed into his guts. MIA3 is easily the goriest of the series, and the squib-happy special effects team seems to relish the opportunity to make every bullet hit explode toward the camera.As you'd expect, there's also plenty of the requisite silliness that goes hand in hand with the like-minded genre films of the era. My favorite turn of events revolves around a group of orphaned Amer-Asian children Norris "rescues," who, in the brief span of time they're in Braddock's presence, get imprisoned in a military installation, see dozens of their countrymen being violently slaughtered, are repeatedly shot at with machine guns, become involved in a precarious truck chase with missiles from a pursuing helicopter detonating all around them, and are forced to march miles through the Vietnamese jungles without food or water before Chuck finally loads the lot of them into a airplane... which he promptly crash lands.Despite some of the goofier moments (Chuck: "I don't step on toes... I step on necks"), MIA3 carries a fairly serious tone throughout, and much as the previous films drove home the real-world plight of American soldiers abandoned by their country during the conflict in Vietnam, Braddock sheds a little light on the civilian casualties of that dreadful war. The opening sequence in particular, set during the chaos amidst the fall of Saigon, features powerful images that wouldn't be out of place in one of the Oscar-ready portrayals of the Vietnam War fallout released during this same period. It certainly helps that the production values here are the highest of the series, and in that respect Braddock has aged better than its two predecessors (although the two cloying Journey copycat tunes that bookend the film definitely have not).General Quoc's final come-uppance isn't quite as impactive as it could be, but the film's closing moments provide a fitting conclusion to the story, and the series. General Braddock has ostensibly retired (I'm guessing that if Chuck had any interest in doing a Missing In Action 4, it would have happened by now), but the character's fairly short-lived screen presence proved to be a consistently entertaining sector of the '80s B-action canon. Even if Chuck Norris hadn't done roughly 400 other low-budget action movies like Braddock: Missing In Action III, I'd like to think that his legacy would be secured by the not-unsubstantial merits of this outing alone.

Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988) ** (out of 4) To say this Cannon film was just a tad bit far-fetched would be like saying Chuck Norris was overlooked for a Best Actor Oscar-nomination. Col. James Braddock (Norris) learns that the wife he thought died during the fall of Saigon is actually alive and he has a 12-year-old son that he never knew about. It turns out the Vietnamese government doesn't like their people who worked for the Americans so the two are deep in enemy territory so Braddock must sneak back in and try to rescue them but he's got the sadistic Gen. Quoc (Aki Aleong) waiting for him. Many reviews will point out that the entire storyline for this third film goes against stuff that happened in the first two movies but I'm not going to put that much thought into a film like this. This is Cannon we're talking about after all and like most of their films this one here is high on action and short on brains. Overall I thought this was a decent little action picture but I can't help but think it would have been much better had the original director (Joseph Zito) not walked from the production. Aaron Norris makes his directorial debut here and to say it's a bad one would be an understatement. He's clearly in over his head and the perfect example of this are the first few scenes in the film. The opening takes place as we see what happens to the wife yet this scene just drags on and on to the point where you get bored with everything taking place. This sequence should have happened at a much quicker pace. The next sequence has Braddock learning the secret of his wife and son, being warned not to go by the CIA and the next thing we know he's in Vietnam and all of this happens in the matter of minutes. The CIA even manages to follow him even though you have to wonder why they waited for him to get there. I mean, why not just stop him at the U.S. airport if they knew when he was going? Norris, the director, just can't handled most of the scenes and the editing isn't much better as thing really come across cheap and ugly at times. With all that said, most people are going to be coming to this thing for action and it at least delivers that. I love those silly explosions and gunfights that you find in a Cannon picture and there are plenty of them here. Bodies are constantly being shot up and the explosions are all of good quality. The eye candy is never short but then they have to ruin things by trying to be dramatic with the relationship between Norris and his son. All of this just comes off extremely silly and it doesn't help that Roland Harrah III just can't act and his scenes of being mad at his father are laughable. Norris isn't much better but at least he knows how to throw a punch and break necks.