Invasion U.S.A.
"If you come back in here, I'll hit you with so many rights that you'll beg for a left." - Hunter
release year: 1985
genre: action
viewing setting: home DVD 7/22/22 and 12/11/15 and 5/26/13 and 3/19/09 and 9/28/04
synopsis: An army of mercenary terrorists invades the United States, and only Chuck Norris can stop them.
impressions: This is one of several silly but action-packed "invade our country" movies from the mid-1980s. The others are Red Dawn and Wanted: Dead or Alive. Anyway, this movie is about a big-time terrorist and his recruiting of various mercenaries to do evil. It's silly because at one point it's mentioned that this is happening at all of the country's borders...yet later, all of the bad guys are brought back together and put in one place. It's action-packed because of a number of shootings, bombings, bazooka attacks, and so on. If you can get past the premise, it's fairly fun to watch - and Chuck Norris dishes out some serious pain. Any way you look at it, this movie was a whole lot sillier before 9/11/2001. More than fifteen years beforehand, we had this movie to offer a worst-case scenario about bad guys exploiting the inherent weaknesses of the U.S. society.
asses kicked by Chuck Norris: 7
body count: 29 by Chuck Norris, 74 confirmed by others, plus a boat massacre, six houses blown up, a mall explosion, and one deceased armadillo
acting: This is the kind of movie that led to the legend of Chuck Norris being able to do anything - here, he's a one-man anti-terrorist extermination machine. Nothing hurts him, nothing slows him down, and nothing stops him. With his twin Uzis and a bit of karate and knife-play, he singlehandedly eliminates the bad guys wherever he finds them, while uttering cool lines like "if you come back in here, I'll hit you with so many rights that you'll beg for a left." When confronted by a big bouncer, he crushes the man's hand around the beer bottle he's holding. When he needs information from a bad guy, he pins his hand to a table with a knife and starts asking questions. When charging into battle, he utterly ignores grenades thrown in his direction. When asked for ID by bad guys posing as cops, he automatically knows they're fake, and so he answers with his Uzi. When bad guys take off in a truck, Chuck leaps onto it without hesitation, proceeding to kick the passenger's ass THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOW WHILE HANGING ONTO THE TRUCK! When some bad guys get confused because their bomb didn't go off, there's Chuck on the roof above them, saying "Didn't work, huh? Now it will." as he drops the bomb on them. When a bad guy has a hostage, Chuck is able to appear right behind the guy, move his gun to his own head, and make him pull the trigger. Anyway, enough about Chuck Norris. Richard Lynch is freaky-looking as the obsessed Russian in charge of all evil in this movie.
final word: Decent invasion movie with lots of violent action, and it brings up some good points about the security of this country (points which have hopefully been corrected since.)
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