In Florida, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas everywhere you go: Families are decorating their trees on the front lawn (huh?); Phyllis Diller is on the tube, shootin’ the shit with Merv; and Porky’s Revenge is playing at the local bijou. And then some Russians have to unload grenade launchers and machine guns into suburban homes and Mexican fiestas and ruin it for everybody. Call it an unprecedented act of terrorism — in fact, call it Invasion U.S.A.
Leading the charge is Mikhail Rostov (a reliably sniveling Richard Lynch, Bad Dreams), and he’d likely win his little war, if not for the CIA recruiting a bearded ex-agent — and Rostov’s longtime archenemy — back into all-American action: the Coors-drinking, alligator-rustling swamp rat Matt Hunter (Chuck Norris, The Delta Force). This Hunter dude is good, saving the stars and stripes with an assist from an ostensible sixth sense; wherever Rostov hatches an attack — even inside a crowded shopping mall — Hunter and his Ford 4×4 suddenly appear, as if he can predict the future … or just happens to be a block away gassing up the truck. Either way, this skill is rather convenient, given our infallible hero insists on being a one-man army.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter’s Joseph Zito directs, but with Norris co-writing the screenplay with frequent collaborator James Bruner (two of the three Missing in Action pictures), one can’t help but wonder if some of the star’s personal politics creeped into the script. Or perhaps it’s mere coincidence that much is made of Hunter saving an entire congregation of good Christian honkies in church, whereas a boatful of dirty foreigners seeking refuge from Cuba becomes a ship of human Swiss cheese — kids included! Unsubtle touches like that and a hooker getting a coke straw kicked up her nose contribute to an all-around bad taste … and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Now a time capsule of Reagan-era America, Invasion U.S.A. knowingly ditches pesky things like “backstory” to hoist itself into that territory of unadulterated, over-the-top action cinema, all the while all but deifying its lead as the personification of patriotism with a mullet and a belt buckle. Compared to his peers/rivals (and eventual fellow Expendables) Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Norris was a second-rate brand of screen he-man, but No. 1 for those crazy Golan-Globus cousins. For their fondly remembered Cannon Films, this box-office Invasion is considered trash canon. —Rod Lott