MegaForce
Directed by: Hal Needham
Written by: Bob Kachler, James Whittaker, etc.
Starring: Barry Bostwick, Persis Khambatta, Edward Mulhare
A Turd is still a Turd even in the Eighties.
When the fictional country of Sardun gets fed up with the hit and run border attacks by their equally fictional neighbors Gamibia, they turn to Megaforce for help. Megaforce is a covert multinational military team composed of the worst stereotypes each country has to offer. The top Sardunian military officials, Gen. Edward Byrne-White (Edward Mulhare) and Major Zara (Persis Khambatta), arrange for a secret rendezvous with the elite group. After a display of their martial prowess (shooting balloons with rockets from their black and gold motorbikes) Ace Hunter, the baby blue bandana-wearing badass leader of Megaforce, takes them on a tour of their secret base. We meet Egg, the resident absent-minded scientist, who invents the stuff our heroes use in their missions. At this point I realized that Megaforce was more than just a collection of national stereotypes. It was also filled with broad caricatures pretending to be characters.
Moving on, Ace devises a plan to destroy a military base in less than 4 minutes and lead the Gamibian forces across the border where Sardun can officially attack them. Major Zara trains with Megaforce so she can join the assault. Training with Ace apparently means skydiving with him alone while cheesy love music plays in the background. In the end Ace decides against bringing Zara along as the presence of a woman would be too distracting for his manly men. They’ve already fallen in love though, and planned to meet up in England when all this is over.
Everything goes according to plan. Megaforce barges in, apparently their gold and black vehicles changes color for these covert assignments. The base is destroyed under 4 minutes, we know this because there’s a handy countdown clock in the corner of the screen. General Guerrera, commander of the Gamibian mercenaries and former comrade of Ace, has a surprise for Megaforce. Sardun cannot allow the team to cross the border because that would make their raid a n official act of war – wait a minute? I thought they were trying to do that?! Who cares who starts the damn war! Hold on, dear readers, it only gets dumber from here. Since the only way out of Gamibia is a dry lakebed that can double as a landing strip, Guerrera decides to park all of his forces there. Except that Megaforce is a covert military group with stealth motorbikes that can cross the border under the cover of darkness. It seems that both Ace Hunter and General Guerrera went to the same special military school because they both decide that a confrontation on the dry lakebed was the best idea ever. Guerrara concentrates all his firepower on Megaforce, ignoring the two defenseless carrier planes landing to pick his enemies up. Our heroes board the planes safely but Ace is still missing. He confronts Guerrera and says the greatest line ever written in the English language. “The good guys always win, even in the eighties!”
Ace chases the taxiing plane on a Megaforce bike and just when you thought this couldn’t get any sillier, the bike flies. Never mind that they’re running for their lives, Ace performs a couple of barrel rolls to the delight of his cheering men, none of whom remembered to lay down cover fire for their commander. Megaforce lands in Sardun so Ace can remind Zara of their date and blow up a Sardunian helicopter for fun. Zara and General Byrne-White laugh it off like it was a kid’s prank and Ace blows his special lady a kiss with his thumb.
There are so many things that Megaforce got wrong that it’s easier to say what they got right, nothing. Seriously though, I give them props for trying to do a GI Joe/Mask type action movie back then. It seems that the producers’ hearts were in the right place, it’s their minds I’m worried about. Megaforce is what happens when you let a roomful of 5 year old boys write your big budget movie. Everything that I found cool as a little kid was in this film, rocket shooting bikes, holograms, dune buggies with lasers and flying kisses instead of all that real kissing that grownups do, yuck!
I love the fact that it’s meant to be a summer blockbuster that failed spectacularly instead of the straight to DVD/SyFy fare that we usually watch. If you want to see a real train wreck of a movie you can’t go wrong with Megaforce.
