There is hardly a fate less enviable for a film than to be used in another film as an example of viewers’ lack of intellect and bad taste. Kevin Smith in his celebrated debut film Clerks gave such “honour” to Navy SEALS, 1990 action film directed by Lewis Teague.
The plot of this film begins in Eastern Mediterranean when the crew of US Navy helicopter gets abducted by group of Lebanese militants. US Navy sends elite team of Navy SEALs to rescue the prisoner and during the operation team discovers caches of US-made Stinger anti-air missiles in the militants’ base. Team’s leader Lieutenant James Curran (played by Michael Biehn) sticks to the original orders and rescues the hostages without trying to destroy the missiles, much to the displeasure of his young and cocky second-in-command, Lieutenant Junior Grade Dale Hawkins (played by Charlie Sheen). Their superiors, however, decide to destroy or at least try to find the missiles, but the militants’ leader Ben Shaheed (played by Nicholas Kadi) proves to be elusive and even willing to try to set ambush for SEALs. Curran, faced with frustrating lack of intelligence, discovers to find missiles’ whereabouts with the help of Claire Warrens (played by Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), half-Lebanese journalist with good local connections in Beirut.
The script for Navy SEALs was originally written by Chuck Pfarrer, who had actually been a Navy SEAL is real life. This was supposed to give the film an authenticity most of the action films of its time lacked. However, by the time production started the script went through numerous changes and re-writes, making it more in line with jingoistic celebration of US military characteristic for Reagan’s era, best embodied by Top Gun. Casting of Charlie Sheen, one of the more popular young actors at the time, was one step in their direction, and his character was written as at time over-enthusiastic maverick, very much like Tom Cruise’s character in 1986 megahit. Originally sold to B-film studio The Cannon Group, script was passed to major studio Orion Pictures and received more than solid budget. US Navy supported the film by lending locations at its major base in Norfolk, Virginia, while in Spain producers enjoyed support of Spanish military, which borrowed its ships, aircraft and land vehicles.
All this effort was, however, wasted due to poor direction of Lewis Teague who directed most of the action scenes at night, making them look cheap. The only exception is spectacular showdown at the end when Teague manages to successfully pass Spanish locations as war-ravaged Beirut. But, before the viewers are able to enjoy that segment, they must endure almost hour and half of quite underwhelming material full of cliches and uninspiring subplots. This, of course, includes something of romantic rivalry between “bad boy” Hawkins and his cool-headed superior over beautiful reporter. Those scenes don’t work because Sheen’s character is poorly written and comes not only as arrogant and irresponsible, but also as racist and bigot (which is inexplicably tolerated by Whalley’s character). Even worse is subplot concerning Graham (played by Dennis Haysbert), team’s only black member who gets called into dangerous mission in the middle of wedding and whose chances of surviving is obvious even to those less familiar with action film cliches. Haysbert is good actor and he makes film look worse by reminding of his role of commander in The Unit, television series that dealt with same themes with much more success. Other good actors are wasted, including almost unrecognisable Bill Paxton as team’s sniper. Although entertaining at the end and perhaps not as abysmal as Kevin Smith would suggest, Navy SEALs is huge disappointment that could be recommended only to the more curious among the cinephiles.
RATING: 4/10 (++)
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