Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		2.5

Missing in Action Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson November 4, 2017

Released a year before Rambo: First Blood Part II, Joseph Zito's Missing in Action (1984) was one of the first films in the post-Vietnam era to deal with remaining American POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia. When the movie opened in November '84, critics frequently compared it to a somewhat different film from one year earlier. Ted Kotcheff's Uncommon Valor (1983) featured a commanding performance by Gene Hackman as a Marine colonel who leads a rescue mission bound for Laos where it's believed the colonel's son and other POWs are still being held. Kotcheff's follow-up to First Blood (1982) also starred Robert Stack, Fred Ward, and Patrick Swayze. The ongoing issue of missing servicemen was becoming such a hot topic around Hollywood that another script also titled Missing in Action was about to go in production at the Cannon Group. (Screenwriter James Bruner gives lots of detailed pre-production anecdotes about the competing screenplays in a new interview on this disc.) Zito emerged as a viable commercial director after his Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was a smash at the box office and Cannon Films sent him and his cast/crew to the Philippines with a modest production budget of $2.5 million.

James Braddock (Chuck Norris) is having recurring dreams about his captivity in a Viet Cong prison camp. The ex-Army colonel spent eight months there as a POW and seven years as an MIA across Vietnam. Braddock believes that the comrades he served with are still being held so he agrees to travel to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) with a US-sponsored investigation team headed by Sen. Maxwell Porter (David Tress). As the American delegates deplane, they are greeted by Gen. Tran (James Hong) but Braddock remembers him as one of his prison tormentors so he refuses to receive the general's extended handshake. At the conference, the Vietnamese spurn any possibility that live US POWs reside in any of their territories. An impatient Braddock dresses himself in black and breaks into Tran's bedroom where he holds a dagger to his old foe's neck demanding answers. Later, Braddock travels to Bangkok where he tracks down an Army buddy, the burly Jack Tucker (M. Emmet Walsh). Braddock and "Tuck" locate a secluded warehouse full of grenades, machine guns, and ammunition. The tag team heads to the Mekong River where it hopes to jump a sneak attack on the unsuspecting VC and spring their war allies out of the gates.

Col. Braddock on a platform assuming control of the operation.

In a newly recorded commentary, Zito concedes that he and his crew changed Bruner's screenplay "tremendously" once principal photography began in the Philippines. That has to be the case as something has been lost in translation from script to screen. Dramatically, Missing in Action has a difficult time succeeding at all. It seems that Zito took the original material and whittled it down to a series of vignettes that don't gel or come together well. One of the movie's best moments occurs when Braddock confronts a survivor/villager at the conference and communicates that everyone has been scarred by the war and he shares a mutual understanding with him about that suffering. However, Braddock misses a chance at exposing the Vietnamese military personnel as liars in front of everyone. Tran accuses him and other US soldiers of war crimes but the very reserved (at least vocally) Braddock doesn't reply with much of a rebuttal. None of the characters on the American senate committee have hardly anything to show or tell the other side with regarding their displaced soldiers. The narrative seems to be building toward a steamy romance between Braddock and Ann Fitzgerald (Lenore Kasdorf), a sexy representative from the State Department. But once Braddock heads for the seedy streets of Thailand, the story drops her. When the film finally gets to some action in the present, it feels forced with Braddock straddling a tightrope between hotels and willing to kill to extract information. Zito could have either given Braddock more initiative earlier or created a predicament where he needed to escape. The first act meanders along too slowly. Zito also truncates the middle of the film because according to Bruner, Braddock was supposed to be aided by three or four of his Army friends aside from just Tuck. Zito's sense of cinematic space and direction of action scenes isn't as focalized as the horror and terror is in The Final Chapter. Unlike the third Friday sequel, war-based or physical action sequences lack any suspense or thrills. Missing in Action's narrative thread pulls away at the seams.

Fans of the MIA series may be surprised but will also be delighted to learn that the first installment received some high marks in the press (although many reviews were harsh). For example, Howard Wornom Jr. of the Daily Press (VA) headlined his review: "B movie deserves an A-plus." Wornom recounts attending a Sunday evening showing of Missing in Action in a packed theater: "The audience was reverently silent in its hatred when the bad guys came on screen, appreciative at Norris' blow-'em-up humor, and as the final scene froze on the screen, the audience clapped heartily." New York Times critic Janet Maslin reported similarly that "in addition to liking Mr. Norris, the Rivoli audience [at the the United Artists Twin in NY] also showed enthusiasm for the film's attitude toward Vietnamese soldiers and officials, who are depicted as no less unequivocally shifty, villainous and deceitful as their stereotyped Japanese counterparts were in B-movies about World War II." Moreover, in the lead paragraph in his critique of Zito's film, the Los Angeles Times's Kevin Thomas expressed admiration for Norris: "If ever there was a contemporary screen hero to send into Vietnam and rescue American soldiers still held captive there, it's martial arts star Chuck Norris, who by now has fused the mythological dexterity of Bruce Lee with the equally mythological All-American gung-ho of John Wayne." According to Daily Variety, Missing in Action opened in 1,150 theaters across the US and Canada on the weekend of November 16 and stood atop at the box office, raking in $6.1 million.

Missing in Action Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Missing in Action makes its second appearance on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory which has released it as a "Collector's Edition." This fifth feature film directed by Zito appears in its originally exhibited ratio of 1.85:1 on a BD-50. The MPEG-4 AVC-encoded transfer gets a mean video bitrate of 30000 kbps for the feature and a total bitrate of 35.55 Mbps for the full disc. Cinematographer João Fernandes's Metrocolor as seen on Shout!'s transer looks like it was taken from the same or a similar source as the 2012 MGM/Fox bare bones release. As Casey Broadwater noted in his review of that region-free disc, some mild brightness flickering is present in a couple of scenes. Additionally, there are a few light scratches visible on the bleak skies of daytime Vietnam and Bangkok. Aside from those blemishes, the print is in very solid shape. Missing in Action looked a notch brighter on my calibrated LED than it does throughout these screenshots. A touch of DNR has been applied but grain is still present, though perhaps not to the degree as on the older disc. I think that density and definition of colors is slightly better in the image on Shout!'s transfer. My score is 3.75.

A dozen scene selections are allotted for movie access on the main menu and also can be skipped to via remote control.

Missing in Action Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

To my surprise, Missing in Action was originally recorded in only mono, which is reproduced here as a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Dual Mono (1908 kbps, 24-bit). Echoing Casey, I didn't notice any hissing, pops, or crackles on this track either. Dialogue is front-heavy but is on the low-end thanks to Morris's soft-spoken demeanor. There are some lines spoken in Vietnamese and Shout! has embedded white English subtitles on the lower-fourth of the image (see Screenshot #20). I was hoping that Shout! could have done a stereo remix as f/x drawn from gunfire and explosions sounds unspectacular. Jay Chattaway's electronic/orchestral score sounds clear and is spread evenly across the front speakers.

There are also English SDH for the English sound track that can be activated on the main menu or via remote.

Missing in Action Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• NEW Audio Commentary with Director Joseph Zito - Red Shirt Pictures' Michael Felsher moderates this feature-length commentary with Zito. Felsher talks from Detroit, MI while Zito speaks from Cairo where he his doing TV work. Judging from Zito's remarks, one would assume that he shot Missing in Action recently as his recollections sound fresh. In English, not subtitled.

• NEW Interview with Writer James Bruner (25:54, 1080p) - Bruner recalls his biographical origins in Hollywood where he shopped his scripts around and also recounts his film education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also addresses the other MIA script and how Chuck Norris first got involved in the series. This is packed with a lot of anecdotes and trivia. In English, not subtitled.

• Theatrical Trailer (1:33, 1080p) - a grainy trailer for the first Missing in Action that is framed in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen.

Missing in Action Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I don't dislike Missing in Action but it neither provides any underlying commentary on the MIA/POW controversy nor is it a stable and consistent action movie. It may be superior to The Hanoi Hilton (1987) but I much prefer Uncommon Valor and First Blood Part II to it. If you already own the MGM BD-50, I would recommend upgrading to this Shout! C.E. While the transfer and lossless audio offer only marginal if negligible improvements over its predecessor, the commentary track with Zito and interview with Bruner are both substantial and highly informative. This release is FOR FANS ONLY.