Ahh yes, this is one of those films. You know the one. You're red-eyed and bleary with fatigue, but you just can't sleep. The dogs of insomnia outside your door. You flip the TV on at about 3am....this is the kind of movie you get.The person who noted that Rutger Hauer looked pretty beefy for a POW is dead-on. Maybe they tied him down for those six years at a Chinese buffet or something. He's a hell of a guy though. He is an Air Force pilot, but he also has ninja skills riding on a truck and messing up missile programming, killing armed guards, and surviving tank explosions. There was also some pretty sad security on that military base. A fence a 12 year old could clime is all that stands between tanks that you can just jump in and ride. There are no guards there either? Robert Patrick goes into that munitions storage and comes out with an RPG which seems to magically reload itself. Hauer's tank also got off three shots....I thought a tank had to be reloaded after firing a shot? Hmm...The dialogue in the last ten minutes was gold. Hauer has killed Patrick's squad...and is heading towards the base to kill his wife...who of course is on the exact floor he blasts his machine guns into. Patrick says something like: "You S.O.B., you're no pilot!" Well, Hauer's character is an S.O.B, and he is also crazy, but he is a pilot and all. That's how this whole thing started.After Hauer's plane crashed into the water at the end, I expected him to spring out of the water, ala Jason in the first Friday The 13th, as Patrick walked with his wife and newborn child.

This movie is astonishingly poor. It was on television when I tuned in during an action scene and was chuckling away at the cheesy macho dialogue, waiting for Leslie Nielsen to appear. It took me a couple of minutes to realise that it wasn't actually a comedy, it was meant to be taken seriously. What has to be remembered is that somebody actually sat down and wrote this movie, and worse still - other people funded it and gave it the green light.Rutger Hauer obviously doesn't read movie scripts before he signs up, either that or he has some seriously bad debts to pay.Strangely, this film is so poor, that you find yourself staring at it, wondering how it actually got funded, and how a TV channel must have paid money for the rights to air it. The dialogue between hero and baddie whilst trying to shoot each other out of the sky is particularly painful, with dialogue sounding like it was generated by a Texas Intruments "Speak & Spell".The Hollywood money machine at it's worst. Funny though.

'Tactical Assault' is the first movie I've seen in which Robert Patrick plays the 'good guy'. Sigh sigh, because I started to hate it! But I'm here to talk about 'Tactical Assault'. And it wàs a disappointment! Where was the action I expected? And the cover of the video showed a Mig or F-15, whatever, but didn't they use F-16's ALL THE TIME??? Jeezes, if you make a movie about jets and such, try make it GOOD. To those who like that genre - I am amongst them - I seriously recommend to see 'Iron Eagle' once again, to forget this horrible experience. Too bad, actually, because Robert Patrick is a great actor. And I kinda expected a lot from this movie...!

The late 1990s seems to be packed with dozens of low-budget, aerial action combat movies, in the same way that Top Gun generated a wave of wanna-be movies (e.g., "Iron Eagle," "Into The Sun," "Flight of Black Angel," etc.) after its release in the 80s. "Tactical Assault" is just one of those military movies that hits the viewer with standard issue plot and an incredibly inconsistent storyline. It almost makes the low-budget Dolph Lundgren movies look good by comparison. Basically the story of "Tactical Assault" revolves around one insane Airforce officer (Holiday) attempting to inflict his anger and revenge on another (Banning), all while a military operation rages on in Eastern Europe. It's basically the air-to-air version of "Dead Calm" combined with "Death Race 2000" in a sense. This movie is essentially insanity bordering on comedy. The funniest scene is in the end where Colonel Banning says "hey, it's just a civillian vehicle" about a dozen times to Captain Holiday who's about to 'accidentally' destroy a white, American cadillac driving haphazardly down a road. The only redeeming value to this movie is Robert Patrick, who does a surprisingly good job as the hunted Colonel Banning.