Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil

Released straight to DVD on October 17, 2006, Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil is the kind of sequel that shares a title and a vague premise with its predecessor and almost nothing else. Owen Wilson and Gene Hackman are gone. So is the aircraft carrier, the Balkans, and the $40 million studio sheen. In their place: a lean, Bulgaria-shot thriller about a Navy SEAL team inserted into North Korea to take out a nuclear missile site, made for a fraction of the original's cost and aimed squarely at the rental shelf.

James Dodson directed and wrote the script, working with a cast of dependable character actors. Nicholas Gonzalez plays Lt. Robert James, the SEAL in charge. Matt Bushell is the wisecracking MCPO Neil "Spaz" Callaghan. Keith David brings his usual gravity as MCPO Scott Boytano. Ben Cross, Bruce McGill, Denis Arndt and Peter Coyote fill out the command-and-intelligence ranks, giving the film a Washington-corridor counterweight to the ground-level action. The plot hinges on a question the tagline spells out: the team is sent to destroy a missile, but nobody tells them why. That omission turns out to matter.

Critics didn't review it in any real numbers. Rotten Tomatoes has no Tomatometer score. Metacritic has nothing. IMDb voters have hovered around 4.5 to 4.9 out of 10 from a small sample of roughly 130 to 140 ratings. The people who did see it tend to agree on one point: the ending packs a genuine surprise. Everything before that is standard-issue military procedural, but the final twist gives the film a cynical kick that most direct-to-video war pictures never bother with. It's also an early credit for composer Pinar Toprak, who went on to score Captain Marvel in 2019. [edit]

Washington gets the intelligence first. North Korea has built a long-range missile that can reach the United States, and it's nearly ready to launch. The discovery sets off a scramble inside the Pentagon and the CIA, where officials with different agendas start circling the problem. The military wants a strike. The diplomats want room to maneuver. The politicians want a solution that doesn't become a catastrophe.

Lt. Robert James (Nicholas Gonzalez) commands a small Navy SEAL team tapped for the job. The mission is straightforward on paper: get into North Korea, find the missile site, destroy it, get out. James is a professional. He expects to be briefed on what he's walking into. What he gets instead is a set of orders that leave out more than they explain. His team includes MCPO Neil "Spaz" Callaghan (Matt Bushell), a veteran with a mouth on him, MCPO Scott Boytano (Keith David), and Ens. David Barnes (Eyal Podell), among others. They're a tight unit, built for quick strikes.

The chain of command above them is anything but tight. Cmdr. Tim Mackey (Ben Cross) and Admr. Henry D. Wheeler (Glenn Morshower) represent the uniformed side. CIA Director Weylon Armitage (Denis Arndt) and the civilians around President Adair T. Manning (Peter Coyote) have their own calculations. South Korean ambassador Li Sung Park (Kenneth Choi) is trying to keep diplomatic channels open while the standoff escalates. Nobody in that room is telling the SEALs everything.

The insertion goes wrong fast. Communications fail. The North Koreans know the team is there. What was supposed to be a surgical strike turns into a running fight through hostile territory, with the SEALs improvising, evading and trying to stay alive long enough to finish the job or at least get home. The film cuts between the men on the ground and the officials in Washington, and the gap between what the soldiers know and what their superiors know keeps widening.

Back in the capital, suspicions start to surface. The intelligence that justified the mission may not be clean. People with power may have reasons for wanting the strike to go forward, or for wanting it to fail. The SEALs, cut off and hunted, have no idea any of this is happening. They're fighting a war whose real shape is being decided far above their heads, and the film builds toward a moment when they'll have to decide whether the orders they were given are worth following.[edit]