Navy Seals (1990)

(In French, On TV, March 2019) The 1980s were about as bad as things got when it comes to exporting violent American imperialism through the magic of Hollywood movies (not-so-coincidentally climaxing with the TV-friendly Gulf War of 1991), and if the release of Navy Seals missed the end of the Reagan administration by two years, it started production years before, with a script from a retired Navy SEAL, pre-production stopped by director Richard Marchand’s death and several script rewrites slowed down by the 1998 WGA Writer’s Strike. None of those delays mattered much considering that the Middle East was still a hotspot during the Bush I administration, and so was the projection of American power in the area. The plot, as conventional as it is, has Navy SEALS tracking down errant Stinger missiles and getting into all sorts of shenanigans. As you’d expect from a Hollywood film, the Navy SEALs protagonists are presented in a very mainstream-friendly way: They fight for America, and they’re bad boys! They don’t play by the rules! They do dangerous things for fun! TO THE EXTREME! As befit a muscular military action film of the 1980s, it does very much feel like an attempt at a recruitment film, albeit not quite as slick or successful as Top Gun. There is some ironic value in seeing Charlie Sheen here in full bad-boy soldier mode, not only considering his troubled personal history later, but specifically his role as the lead of the Hot Shots! military spoofs starting the following year. Still, once you put away issues of geopolitical power projection and ironic casting, there isn’t much here to report—Navy Seals is about as basic as military action films were during that period.