The Drug War-as-Actual-War Craze of the '90s and Aces: Iron Eagle III

The use of the phrase "War on Drugs" not as a rhetorical expression of seriousness of intent on the part of the speaker or analogy between an un-war-like activity and war intended to convey the intensity of the effort to which they aspired (as with a "War on Poverty"), but somehow actually a war to be fought with conventional military means, was very much in the air in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And as may be expected, military techno-thrillers, in a moment where their books were still very strong sellers, but the longtime favored choice of enemy, the Soviet Union, was passing from the scene (and which was not a particularly likely group to examine such ideas critically), rushed to depict exactly that. Thus Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger had accounts of the same satellites with which the U.S. spied on the Soviets listening in on drug lords' cell phones, the Air Force using an F-15 to swat drug-runners' planes from the skies, the U.S. Navy mounting a strategic "Flight of the Intruder" against the drug cartels' leadership the way Coonts' Jake Grafton targeted the leadership of North Vietnam, and minigun-armed Pave Low helicopters infiltrating special forces into Colombia who end up fighting a not-so-small-unit action against hundreds of drug cartel soldiers. Dale Brown, making his Drug War more war-like still, equipped his drug-runners with MiGs and Mirages and anti-ship missiles to make a . . . well, make a Dale Brown novel out of it.

Hollywood, which on top of the problems faced by the novelists was trying to figure out ways to keep making their increasingly decadent-looking action movies bigger and better and hitting on incorporating lots of "heavy metal" military hardware to do it, was thinking along similar lines, with at least two major features coming out of the tendency, notably the "Top Gun for Army aviation," Fire Birds (1990)--and the second sequel to Iron Eagle, Aces: Iron Eagle III.

Neither film was any great success, the second film less so than the first.1 Iron Eagle III, coming out in June 1992 the week after the adaptation of Tom Clancy's Patriot Games, grossed about $1.4 million on its opening weekend. Not a typo, it was about a twelfth of what Patriot Games made in its second weekend of play ($16.1 million), which put Aces at #11 on the list of the highest-grossing films of the week. The next week Batman Returns went into wide release and broke records for an opening weekend take, while Aces did . . . even less well than it had the previous week, so that the $10 million+-budgeted movie ultimately finished up with $2.5 million grossed, which even then did not let it place among the top hundred highest-grossing movies of the year. (Among "in-year" releases it was actually #142 on the list.) Moreover, time has not been kind to it in respect of the public's attention. While the original Iron Eagle has lingered in the pop cultural consciousness (getting, for example, significant mention in Ready Player One author Ernest Cline's "sophomore effort" Armada), Aces was pretty much forgotten by all except the writers of Family Guy.2 Indeed, I myself only caught the film during a few airings on cable a couple of decades ago, since which time I have not noticed it there or on streaming (the straight-to-video follow-up, Iron Eagle IV, actually seeming easier to catch there).

Still, the film has its points of interest, not least a number of details of the premise making for at least some novelty. In an era before senior citizen action heroes became routine, that is what we got in the collection of older pilots who head off to face the enemy, with a little further interest derived from the group's diversity--with General Charles "Chappy" Sinclair joined by a Briton, a German and a Japanese pilot whose teaming together at once evokes and transcends the Second World War conflict of Allies and Axis (indeed, the choice to bring Anglosphere pilots together with a German and especially a Japanese aviator seems the more interesting given its implicit break with the Germanophobia, and especially Japanaphobia, in which so much pop culture was trafficking at the time). This is all the more the case in as they all fly into action in their countries' iconic World War II fighters. Chappy goes into battle in a P-38 Lightning, the Briton in a Spitfire, the German in a Messerschmitt-109, and the Japanese in a Zero--while the villain has vintage aircraft in his own collection, notably a rocket-powered Messerschmitt-263.

There is likewise interest in the unlikely-seeming cast and crew. Here Louis Gossett Jr. is joined by Horst Buckholz of The Magnificent Seven as the German pilot, and the late martial arts legend Sonny Chiba as the Japanese, while Christopher Cazenove (who played an RAF pilot cut out of the Battle of Britain by a car accident in The Eye of the Needle) gets his chance to fly a Spitfire into action, all of which together lends the team a bit of a proto-Expendables quality. Meanwhile Paul Freeman plays the villain (Renee Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, this time he is an actual Nazi rather than just working for and with Nazis); while also appearing are Watergate figure, then-techno-thriller movie staple and later U.S. Senator and candidate for President of the United States Fred Thompson; the same Phill Lewis today known principally as the Mr. Moseby in the Disney Channel's sitcoms has his part in the events; and bodybuilding superstar Rachel McLish in her first major acting role.3 And helming the production was John Glen--Aces one of just three feature films he made after directing all five of the '80s-era Everything Or Nothing-produced James Bond films.4

None of this makes Iron Eagle III a masterpiece, of course. But my admittedly remote and hazy memory is that taken as the silly B-movie that it unashamedly is it works well enough, while its more novel features are quite adequate to make it at the very least interesting as a curiosity--and so give the film a place, however minor, in the history of the genre.

1. All box office data from Box Office Mojo.
2. Brian was writing a screenplay--and Lois informed him that the Iron Eagle movies had already used his premise, mentioning number three specifically.
3. Fred Thompson had previously appeared in The Hunt for Red October, and The Flight of the Intruder (in the latter, replacing Married . . . With Children's Ed O'Neill in a crucial scene). Bodybuilders, and athletes of McLish's stature, seem to have had more prominence pop culturally and more chances at acting careers then, even if their careers often happened to be short. McLish's principal other film (apart, of course, from the documentary Pumping Iron II) was the straight-to-video thriller Raven Hawk (1996).
4. The other two were Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, one of two much-hyped big-budget flops which aimed to capitalize on the 500th anniversary of the voyage in 1992 (the one with Marlon Brando as Torquemada, which came out just a couple of months after Aces); and, barring Glen's coming out of retirement, his last, 2001's Christopher Lambert thriller The Point Men.