If there's one thing in life you usually shouldn't question, it's the brutal character of an Italian mid-80's action flick. There was a truckload of them overflowing the more hidden shelves of raunchy video stores back in the late 80's and they pretty much all looked similar. They had deliciously appealing VHS cover art, complete with heavily muscled and testosterone bursting males firing off big machine guns, and provocative taglines like "Shoot first, ask questions
never" or "They Shoot 'em all up!". On the backside of these VHS boxes, there were several more enticing stills depicting pure mayhem and carnage. The good thing about these images is that they're 100% reliable! These movies truly are a non-stop spitfire of extreme action, gratuitous mega- explosions, muscle showcasing and horrible macho dialogs. "The Wild Team" is Umberto Lenzi's contribution to the popular trend, but it actually was a bit of a disappointment. Especially in comparison with other contemporary jungle mayhem highlights (like Bruno Mattei's "Strike Commando", Antonio Margheriti's "Commando Leopard" or – most of all – Ruggero Deodato's awesome "Cut and Run"), "The Wild Team" is rather tame and unmemorable. The plot contains all the required ingredients and clichés to guarantee pure entertainment, but the film simply lacks the essential panache! The cast is stupendous (Antonio Sabato, Ivan Rassimov and Werner Pochath!) and the body count is tremendous, but the adrenalin and kicks aren't bursting from the screen like supposed to. When the son of the popular President of Manioca, a small Southern American island, gets kidnapped by the henchmen of the communist dictator who took over the power. They threaten to kill the boy if the President would even just consider to take up his former position again. A multinational in Florida supports the President – because he guarantees free access to the country's profitable silver mines – and hires a quintet of rough mercenaries to go on a rescue mission. The search and rescuing of the boy goes rather fluently, if you don't take into account a shamelessly overlong para-sailing sequence, and after about 45 minutes you wonder what'll happen next because everything looks solved. But then, of course, Lenzi begins with all the dire but inevitable sub plots including treason, corruption, self-sacrifice and getting saved from the jungle by an annoying 12-year-old. There's nothing exceptional or remotely remarkable about the jungle action sequences and it's never a good sign when even the shootout sequences start to look boring after a while. Stelvio Cipriani's score is undoubtedly the best thing to mention here, but unfortunately the music doesn't suit the tone and subject matter of the film. His best scores are for mysterious and sleazy horror films or gialli, like "What have they done to our Daughters", not brainless action flicks.
