Delta Force 2

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Theatrical Trailer (Full Frame, Dolby Digital 2.0)
Rating
Year Released	1990
Running Time	106:02 Minutes (Not 111 minutes as per packaging)
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (60:14)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Selection then Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Aaron Norris
Studio Distributor	Cannon Films, Inc. Fox Home Video	Starring	Chuck Norris Billy Drago John P. Ryan Richard Jaeckel Begonia Plaza
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$34.95	Music	Frederic Talgorn

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s) French (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s) Italian (Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, 192 Kb/s) Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	?	Smoking	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired German German for the Hearing Impaired French Italian Spanish Dutch Swedish Finnish Norwegian Danish Portuguese Polish	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Delta Force 2 begins by outlining the activities of cocaine lord Ramon Cota (Billy Drago), a man who considers massacring an enemy's colleagues to be a friendly method of greeting. After an attempt to arrest him brings such results for the DEA, we cut to a restaurant somewhere in the United States where Scot McCoy (Chuck Norris), now a colonel, is dining with Major Bobby Chavez (Paul Perri) and Bobby's wife, Rita (Ruth de Sosa). After knocking some sense into a group of skinheads that are harassing the restaurant's owner, we then cut back to more of Cota's business activities before Scott and Bobby are asked to go into San Carlos to contact one of the DEA's agents. After passing on the advice that it's no longer safe in San Carlos for anyone even remotely connected to the DEA, they proceed to arrest Cota. Of course, with the American legal system being what it is, Cota is let off without so much as a slap on the hand, and Bobby's whole family become the unfortunate victims. Of course, you can see where this is heading, with an angry McCoy raring to dive into San Carlos and shoot the crap out of anything that looks remotely like a South American drug lord.

    It is worth noting that this particular film predates Walker: Texas Ranger by three years, and comes four years after Firewalker, which has the dubious honour of being the worst film that Norris has ever graced. Delta Force 2 sits somewhere in between the unintended camp of the former and the unabashed crappiness of the latter, with horrible acting, horrible music, and a horrible story all around. Billy Drago spends the entire film looking as if he took his salary in drugs and trying hard to do a bad Marlon Brando impersonation, while Paul Perri, as an actor, makes a great piece of furniture. Still, if you have a taste for bad action films and you've rented everything else at your local outlet, then Delta Force 2 will keep you laughing for a hundred minutes.

Video

    The transfer is very sharp, with everything in the picture being well defined and easy to make out, save for the occasional lapse during the principal photography stage. The use of an RSDL disc for this film has resulted in one of the smoothest, most natural-looking transfers I have seen to date, and it is a real pity that the transfer is of such a turkey. The shadow detail can be described as good, with everything important being easy to make out during the darker parts of the film. There is no low-level noise to spoil the picture, and film grain is not really an issue here, either.

    The colour saturation is smoother and more natural than was the case in The Delta Force, but it still has a certain daytime television look about it. There is no bleeding or misregistration apparent at any time, so we have little to complain about. If there is one complaint I could make about the colour saturation, it is that the skin tones seem unnaturally dark a lot of the time.

    MPEG artefacts were not an issue in this transfer, with pretty much all of the film being allocated the maximum rate of ten megabits per second, resulting in a very smooth and clean look in each shot. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some minor aliasing in the edges of roofs and on car grilles, but this artefact was quite well controlled, all things considered. Film artefacts are a small issue for this transfer, with the occasional burst of medium-sized black flecks appearing on the picture to remind us that this film is a decade old. Still, if all transfers of decade-old B-grade action films could look this good, then we'd have no need for digital photography or high-definition formats.

    As intimated previously, this disc is presented in the RSDL format, with the layer change taking place at 60:14. This is in a reasonably good spot that doesn't disrupt the flow of the action too much, although there was little care taken to hide the pause.

Audio

    The dialogue is clear and easy to understand most of the time, although the occasional bout of mumbling resulted in one or two lines being all but impossible to make out. Some distortion is apparent in one or two lines that were recited a little too loudly for the recording equipment to cope with, but this is only a minor problem. There are no obvious problems with audio sync.

    The score music in this film is credited to Frederic Talgorn, and an especially B-grade action effort it is, too. It follows a similarly hokey approach to the music of the previous episode, furthering the unintentional comedy of the dialogue, but without the occasional inspired moment of hilarity that kept Alan Silvestri's score for The Delta Force from becoming a bore.

    The surround channels are, once again, not used with any great frequency or inspiration, in spite of numerous opportunities. The sounds of missiles flying through the air in particular are confined to the front of the soundstage when they should have been at least directed into both surrounds at once. Indeed, there is little difference in surround performance between the surround-encoded soundtracks and the Italian dub, which is certainly a mono recording split into the stereo channels. Once again, the surround field is front-heavy and comes off more like a mono soundtrack with the occasional stereo element mixed in. The subwoofer was used with moderate frequency to support explosions and other bass-heavy sounds, and did so without calling any specific attention to itself.

Menu

Theatrical Trailer (1:38)

    The Region 1 version of this disc misses out on;

• Correct aspect ratio
• RSDL Formatting

    The video quality is very good.

    The audio quality is functional.

    The extras are minimal.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall