Target Eagle (1982)

Posted on Sep 25, 2002 under Action-suspense |

Written and directed by J. Antonio de la Loma
Starring
- George Rivero
- Maud Adams
- George Peppard
- Max von Sydow

After I watched Target Eagle, I went to bed and had a nightmare — that I was still watching it. Parachutes kept floating lazily to the ground behind my eyelids; the damned thing just wouldn’t end.

Parachutes, naturally, start the movie — lost of footage of skydivers in their baggy pantaloons doing their “human snowflake” moves under the opening credits. Then we start the story with yet another skydiving segment. This one, though, is at night; ain’t that creative. It’s actually day-for-night, but they compensated for that by filtering the shot so heavily that you can barely see a damned thing. What you can just barely make out is that a skydiver jumps from a plane, people on the ground watch him through binoculars, his ripcord fails to, ah, “rip,” and he ends up doing a Wile E. Coyote while the occupants of the plane chortle into their moustaches and fly away.

I can fly! WHEEEEEEEE!

At the funeral the next day, two men cheerfully prechew some exposition for us; the swandiver was an American agent here in Spain who had infiltrated a drug-running ring but, pretty apparently, had been found out. The two men are problematic; the boss-man is Max von Sydow, but they never — NEVER — give his name in the course of the movie. We do eventually hear that he’s called “The Ogre” behind his back, so that’s what we’ll run with. The other fellow, with impressive disco hair, is Captain Casado (Joseph White), and he’s not speaking with his own voice. That’s a common problem around here.

Also appearing on the scene is Carmen (Maud Adams), fiancee of Agent Flat, who wants to run the investigation operation, but Casado won’t let her ’cause she’s too close and all. (I’m not sure what agency it is running American drug-busting operations in Spain, but they appear to have all of five people on staff, so it’s not like Casado’s got a lot of resumes to choose from.)

Their ranks are about to swell, though, because Deadmeat’s old Foreign Legion buddy is back in town. This, ladies and gentlemen, is George Rivero, sometimes credited as Jorge Rivero, a Spanish leading man of some repute. He’s got a square jaw, piercing eyes, and a buff physique. Unfortunately, what he doesn’t have is a name. that’s right, another unintroduced character. And frankly, I’m not going to take that from two characters in the first five minutes, so Rivero is going to get the label “Bucky” as punishment.

“If I stand here long enough, I can imagine we’re in a much better movie.”

Okay, granted, maybe they did say his name; the dubbed voices are often muffled and sound like they promised homeless people to come read some lines in exchange for free beer. That’s not the worst alternative, though; Rivero uses his own voice, which is disastrous. His knowledge of the English language sounds like rote memorization; the occasional attempts at witty repartee come off more like a minor traffic accident.

Anyway. He comes into town looking for Flatman, whose sister tells him all she knows about his death, which isn’t much ’cause it was all government business and hush-hush. And then Bucky gets chased by someone arresting him, so then we get three cop cars vs. a jeep on the streets of Barcelona. Thrill to the non-stop defensive driving! After wasting five minutes on this, Bucky gets the drop on a cop, takes his gun, sees his badge, and says, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a cop?” (Who else would be trying to arrest you, ya moron — the milkman?)

Glossing over why an American agent in Spain would have the ability to arrest anybody, Bucky gets dragged before the Ogre, who thoughtfully reads his tough-guy mercenary rapsheet aloud for us. He then makes Bucky an offer: Come and work for us, taking Captain Nosedive’s place as designated infiltrator, or they’ll let him rot in a cell beneath their offices without food or water. (Man, it doesn’t take long before American agents operating overseas turn all medieval, does it?) And Carmen is put in charge of the operation, to minimize the number of people who know about it. (Which, given the former headcount, is still more than half of the department.)

The perfect accessory for Gaudi architecture: A plummetting dummy.

Their plan is simple. Bucky’s also got parachuting on his resume (who doesn’t?), so they’re going to send him to hang around at a skydiving and flight school where he can be recruited by unsavory types. Which gives us opportunities for just scads of aerial footage — Bucky hotdogging in a biplane, Bucky horning in on another one of those “human snowflake” things, Bucky pissing off the cute skydiver Laura (Susana Dosamantes), Bucky playing the masher with Laura in midair (boy, those Spaniards sure know how to finesse the ladies), Laura screaming “I don’t ever want to see you again!” once they get to the ground with a Gilligan cut to Bucky and Laura dancing slow in a bar (see former comment on Spaniards and finesse), Laura showing up in Bucky’s hotel wearing the most godawful wrap of all time (although I suppose if you want a guy to undress you, wearing ugly clothes is one plan), Laura cleaning Bucky out of everything the next morning except for his tighty-whities. Nothing but wall-to-wall excitement here, folks.

That bit about Laura cleaning him out makes absolutely no sense, by the way. It’s revealed a little later that Laura’s actually an agent working for Carmen, and stripped him clean (in more ways than one) on her orders. No reason is ever given.

Anyway, after more joyriding (this time in a custom ultralight), Bucky is approached by Sergio (Robert A. Miller), underworld recruiter with a nefarious moustache. It doesn’t take much to win the trust of a crimelord’s lackey these days, and soon Bucky’s got the assignment to fly 20 kilos of heroin to Gibraltar. He celebrates by taking the news to Carmen, then grabbing her and forcing her to kiss him. (Insert repetetive remark about Spaniards and finesse…) Then he sees Laura on the street, chases her into a dojo, and almost gets his ass handed to him before diving through a plate glass window. (Despite the promise of kung fu mayhem, this fight apparently dated from the era before anyone used the word “choreography” in conjunction with martial arts.)

“How long are you going to let that reviewer call you ‘Bucky,’ anyway?”

Then the Ogre gets some pivotal information (can’t you just feel the tension?): he’s given a tip through anonymous channels about Bucky’s flight — but he wisely deduces that the tipoff came from the bad guys, who are using Bucky as the decoy. And here’s even more momentous information: Carmen finally lets it slip within our hearing that the hero’s name is actually “David”! Wow! A name! And only 51 minutes into the running time! Yippee! Unfortunately, since he’s been Bucky up to now, he’ll be Bucky from here on out.

The Ogre doesn’t want to tip their hand, though, so he doesn’t warn David. But since, through another incomprehensible subplot that’s far too boring to tell you about, they’ve found out that the Libyan ambassador’s yacht is being used for EE-vil purposes, so they take ten minutes of our time to set up and execute a fake bomb threat aboard the yacht in order to evacuate it and sniff out the heroin. (And some uranium, which turns out to be a sample from a shipment stolen from France, destined for the Libyans. This is a subplot which makes not a whit of difference.)

While we’re at it, there was also another skipped-over subplot in here (because that’s what you do when your main plot sucks rocks, you fill the screen with subplots and hope that no one notices) about American ambassadorial aide Sam (Chuck Connors!), occasionally doing intelligence favors for Captain Casado until he gets knifed at a gallery showing, whereupon Casado chases the assassin and shoots him off an apartment building designed by Antonio Gaudi. I’d have left this part out entirely except, well, Antonio Gaudi is cool, so I had to give him a mention.

“If I stand here long enough, I can imagine…”

Back in what we laughingly refer to as a plot, Bucky is brought down by law enforcement but escapes with his cargo; his contact takes him to the palatial estate of the crime lord, MacFadden (George Peppard, basically doing a warmup for Hannibal Smith except he’s a bad guy). And wouldn’t ya know it, Bucky also knows MacFadden from his merc days, though apparently MacFadden hadn’t known Mister Deceleration Trauma before he came to work for him. Over the classically villainous game of croquet, MacFadden tells Bucky all about his operations, which Bucky then relays to Carmen. The plan involves MacFadden parachuting drugs and uranium in huge crates, so Bucky recruits Carmen (also a skydiver — what are the odds?) to be his “second man” on the mission; then Sergio, for no reason I could gather, tossed Carmen’s room and found a photo she had taken from Bucky’s purloined possessions showing Bucky and the Flatman together, so then MacFadden wants him dead, so they escape from their chalet on a snowmobile and skis and a hangglider in a much more boring fashion than one would assume.

Then they get to MacFadden’s secret base (conveniently located withing hangglider distance of the chalet), stow away in the trucks to the airstrip (Bucky in the back of the truck: “Sounds like things are starting to happen.” It’s the end of the movie! Too damned late, nitwit!), and hijack the plane. End of movie. (MacFadden was captured offscreen by the French. Since I know some Frenchmen, I’ll refrain from the obligatory “Who surrendered first?” gag.)

And that’s it. If I were an insanely positive person, I could say that this movie is “refreshingly free of the baggage of dramatic tension.” The script is tepid, written by a non-native English speaker and slowed to a crawl by scenes of expository discovery. The music made me want to go out and hit somebody. And the acting…

Dear heavens, the acting. I know that even top-flight actors like Max von Sydow or seasoned performers like Chuck Connors couldn’t have made a silk purse out of this, but the very existence of George Rivero’s anti-ability drags down his every scene. I actually feel sorry for the rest of the cast, as they still had to act in scenes opposite Rivero and pretend that he wasn’t a talentless side of beef. (The experience apparently didn’t sour Maud Adams on films of international intrigue, as she appeared in Octopussy the next year.)

On the other hand, they all got paid to appear in it, and I didn’t get paid for sitting through it, so they’re still ahead.