Review: Counterforce

An elite squad of American operatives (Jorge Rivero, Andrew Stevens, Isaac Hayes, Kevin Bernhardt) are sent to the Middle East to protect a progressive politician (Louis Jourdan) currently under threat by an extremist Dictator (Robert Forster). Kabir Bedi is a relative of the Dictator, who is deployed to handle things on the ground, with Hugo Stiglitz playing a creepy assassin in an Iron Maiden shirt. George Kennedy turns up as the superior officer of our protagonists.

 

Low-rent 1988 mixture of “The A-Team” and “The Delta Force”, this Jose Antonio De Lama (“Killing Machine” with Lee Van Cleef, Richard Jaeckel, and Jorge Rivero) cheapie even features two of the latter film’s co-stars, George Kennedy and Robert Forster. The results aren’t any good, but they’re probably slightly better than you expect. You’d swear this was another Cannon film, recycling one of their own films and featuring two of the same actors, one in essentially the same role. We even get one of the worst synth job bullshit music scores from Joel Goldsmith (“Laserblast”, “The Man With Two Brains”, “Watchers”), son of the great Jerry Goldsmith (“A Patch of Blue”, “Planet of the Apes”, “The Omen”).

 

Playing a Middle Eastern dictator this time instead of an Arab terrorist, Robert Forster is just as miscast as he was in “The Delta Force”. He is however, slightly more fun so it’s a shame that this sloppily made film shafts him off to the side for much of its length in favour of Bond villain Kabir Bedi. Bedi’s actually pretty good here, along with a surprisingly invested Louis Jourdan he’s the highlight of the film. A dubbed Hugo Stiglitz (who also had a role in “Killing Machine”) is imposing, cold-eyed fun as an eccentric assassin. Sadly, a sleepwalking George Kennedy is as poorly utilised as Forster, basically playing the Lee Marvin role from “The Delta Force” but both actors here are pretty much benched after the first act. Instead of Chuck Norris, we get a low-rent “A-Team” headed by a greying Jorge Rivero doing his best Erik Estrada. He’s pretty forgettable as a leading man, to be honest. For ‘comic relief’ we get forced goofiness from Zen enthusiast Andrew Stevens and the ice-cool but underused Isaac Hayes as perhaps this film’s B.A. Barracus…only rapping some of his dialogue. Stevens is no actor (there’s a reason he moved into producing), but he grows on you a bit, whilst Hayes has charisma and presence but nothing much to say or do here. I would’ve liked more scenes with Horst Buchholz-lookalike Kevin Bernhardt, who is quite cool when seen, which sadly isn’t often enough. In fact, it feels like this film was made whenever the actors had a weekend free, sometimes not the same weekend. I also think it feels like the pilot to an “A-Team”-style action TV series that never got picked up.

 

Action-wise there’s lots of gunfire but no real violence, and the finale is a bust. It’s basically a re-tread of the climax to “Sky Riders” and “For Your Eyes Only”, but with a distracting blue tint that coupled with the dark of night scenes, makes things very hard to discern on screen.

 

Mediocre action film with lots of gunfire and a capable cast who are never properly wrangled into the story. It’s all rather clunky and at best, a C-level moderate diversion. The unoriginal screenplay is by Douglas Borton (who strangely has no other IMDb credits beyond being an ‘author’ credit on an upcoming film called “Mark of Kane”), with a story by Borton, de la Loma, Carlos Varsallo (producer-writer of the even more shoddy Chuck Connors film “Day of the Assassins”, which co-starred Rivero), and Sandra K. Bailey (“Prettykill”). Four people had a hand in writing this simplistic Reagan-era actioner? Really?

 

Rating: C