Review: Iron Eagle (1986)

As much as enjoy both decently entertaining big-budget blockbusters and smartly-crafted smaller flicks, there’s always room for seeking out the cheesiest, the most nonsensical, the gloriously awful crap. Most films starring Jackie Chan or Bruce Campbell aren’t exactly rife with artistic merit but are still damn fun to watch—but I want to go beyond. Troma, Corman, Ed Wood, all that stuff—and the routes I take can be half the fun themselves. Like, for instance, wondering what a film even cheesier than Top Gun and even more upfrontly Reaganist than Red Dawn would be like.

The answer? 1986’s Iron Eagle—haven’t heard of it? Not surprising, as that same year it was crushed by another hilarious film about jet fighter combat, the aforementioned Top Gun. Top Gun at least had Tom Cruise, Van Kilmer, and lots of exhilarating aerial footage courtesy of their grateful sponsors at the US Navy. And what does Iron Eagle have? Erm…well, it has Queen on the soundtrack. And oh boy, what a soundtrack.

 I’m getting ahead of myself a bit here. Alright—so, the film opens up with a group of US jet fighters flying over the coast of an unidentified Middle Eastern country that’s your standard proxy back then for Iran/Libya. I’m not sure if it even has a name, but Reagan era media gave us such gems as Carbombya, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was something just as dumb here. In any case, said fighters get engaged by a group of MiGs who seem rather upset at being buzzed by foreign jets, but they’re naturally evil and wrong. After the first of many choppy dogfights, one of the US pilots gets captured, no doubt to be locked away and be forced to watch Egyptian soap operas for days on end.

And so we cut to said pilot’s son, Doug (Jason Gedrick), who on the scale of 80s teen heroes, ranks…well, he’s no Ferris Bueller or Marty McFly, but he’s above Jason Bateman at least. Doug seems to spend most of his time racing Stereotypical Eighties Bullies with the help of his Stereotypical Eighties Black Best Friend, and literally carries with him a tape of cheesy rock tunes to listen while he’s operating delicately driven machinery. This ranges from the great, like Freddy Mercury, to the hilariously terrible, like Rainey Haynes’ corny yowling. In fact his mixtape is so defining to his character that’s literally the only thing that’ll get him through the conflicts ahead.

Before long, he learns of his poor papa’s predicament, and despite the movie cheerleading ‘Ronnie Raygun’ over ‘the peanut guy’, the US is inexplicably helpless to do anything against the Evil Arabs That Hate Freedom For No Reason. So, he hits on the genius idea to take on an entire military dictatorship himself, hitting up veteran pilot Chappie, played by Loius Gasset Jr. Despite supposedly being the level-headed one, Chappie has no issue with helping a kid barely out of high school hijack military hardware and fly into mortal danger, all while causing an international incident in the process. However, this is the eighties, and Doug has rock music on his side, and being very cognizant of both facts, is not daunted.

After literally two days of crash course training and Chappie doing his best to channel himself as the Mr. Miyagi of air combat (and not really succeeding), both jet off to blow shit up for freedom. Overseeing the execution of Doug’s father and the defending enemy forces is an evil Colonel with the usual porno stache every other 80s villain has, and despite his chilling demeanour, is extremely incompetent, failing to scramble more than a few jets at a time against our duo and passing up an attempt to just missile Doug once he lands to grab his dad. In the process, our jovial teenage hero also no doubt causes dozens of civilian deaths as he blows up an oil refinery just to stick it to Colonel Baddiefi. There’s some attempt at tension as Chappie is shot down, but Doug still has the power of Freddie Mercury to help him mow down hundreds of people, so it’s all totally rad!

Oh, and the ‘combat’ scenes are comically terrible. You get the joy of a split-second of a gun firing, to immediately cutting in the blink of an eye to a jet spontaneously combusting. There’s no sense of where the hell everything is in relation to one another, but hey, there’s plenty of ‘splosions, and plenty of ‘One Vision’ to complete the disturbingly propagandist tone!

Eventually, Colonel Stache takes to the air to combat Doug himself, even apparently dismissing the rest of his squadrons, because he’s dumb. The dogfight consists of both planes rolling around until Doug somehow finds himself behind the other and blows him to kingdom come. After that, the US shows up to rescue him, and despite stealing expensive vehicles and starting an incident, Doug is fast-tracked to the Air Force Academy despite already being able to take on a whole country and win. Because why not.

Overall? Iron Eagle is a terrible film, but if you like yourself some good ol’ eighties cheese that doesn’t even care that it’s terrible, try this one out if you’ve got your fill of Top Gun and want to advance to something even more gorgonzola-flavored. But it does match that certain type of eighties movie, the sorts that tried to let a nation riding the high of Reaganomics to fix a less than joyful last few decades. Rambo II retroactively won ‘Nam, this retroactively fixes the Operation Eagle Claw debacle. A couple decades later, and some did indeed seem to think that just dropping surpluses of explosives onto the desert would fix problems—and as for how that turned out, or how that attitude may or may not persist into current events, that may be crossing over topics too much for my preference here.

But Iron Eagle is far too silly to take seriously or to really connect it to anything resembling reality. If all of the above just sounds too stupid for you, well, I don’t blame you, because it is really stupid. But you want to delve into the crap pile of bad jet fighter movies (that also includes the Iron Eagle sequels, Stealth, and so on)—well, this is a good a place to start as any. Just be prepared to have Queen’s back catalogue stuck in your head.