Metacritic reviews

I thought this was going to be another hilarious disaster movie, but I was wrong. The Delta Force settles down into a well-made action film that tantalizes us with its parallels to real life.

The movie is not Oscar caliber by any means. The acting is spare and without much passion.. Sure the movie is worth one or two stars at best. But it's a hell of a ride nonetheless.

Despite its large scale, it plays like a formula TV movie. [14 Feb 1986, p.C4]

Students of minimal acting techniques can compare Marvin and Norris: impassivity versus vacancy. Students of the disaster film should write a short thesis on why George Kennedy is ubiquitous. Everyone else might wonder why the film is so virulently anti-Arab.

Golan barely touches on the fundamental conflicts that created the situation there and simply offers a pack of wild-eyed, swarthy Arabs preying on passive, middle-aged Jews represented by the likes of Winters, Balsam, Bishop, and Kazan. Such horrors do happen, but they do not have to be presented as a cartoon.

The 1986 film all others will have to beat for sheer, unashamed, hilariously vulgar vaingloriousness.

Golan and Bruner, in other words, have made the Holocaust into just another tear-jerking tool for the Cannon Productions shlockenspiel. This is called "chutzpah." The unoffended will find that the movie doesn't even deliver on its own sordid level. There isn't any action till 70 minutes into the film.

The script plays like ''The Dirty Dozen'' saving the passenger list of ''Airport `77.''

Like most Norris vehicles, The Delta Force is long on spurious action and short on production values. It's also silly, but it's more than that. Rambo asked, "Do we get to win this time?"; Norris' Delta Force gets to go back and win last time. [19 Feb 1986, p.D8]