Retired Marine Colonel Jason Rhodes (Gene Hackman) and oilman Harry MacGregor (Robert Stack) share a tragic bonf.  Both of them have sons that served in Vietnam and are listed as being MIA.  Believing that their sons are still being secretly held in a POW camp in Loas, Rhodes and MacGregor put together a team to sneak into Southeast Asia and rescue them.

With MacGregor supplying the money and Rhodes leading the mission, the team includes Blaster (Red Brown), Wilkes (Fred Ward), Sailor (Randall “Tex” Cobb), and Charts (Tim Thomerson), all of whom served with Rhodes’s son.  Also joining in his helicopter pilot Curtis Johnson (Harold Sylvester) and former Marine Kevin Scott (Patrick Swayze), whose father was also listed as being MIA in Vietnam.  After a rough start, the group comes together and head into Laos to bring the prisoners home!

Uncommon Valor is one of the many movies released in the 80s in which Vietnam vets returned to Asia and rescued those who were left behind.  In the 80s, there was a very strong belief amongst many Americans that soldiers were still being held prisoner in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and Hollywood was quick to take advantage of it.  The box office success of Uncommon Valor set the stage for films like Rambo and Missing In Action, film in which America got the victory that it had been denied in real life.

What set Uncommon Valor apart from the films that followed was the cast.  Not surprisingly, Gene Hackman brings a lot more feeling and nuance to his performance as the obsesses Col. Rhodes than Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris brought to their trips to Vietnam.  The film surrounds Hackman with a quirky supporting cast, all of whom represent different feelings about and reactions to the war in Vietnam.  Fred Ward’s character suffers from PTSD.  Randall “Tex” Cobb, not surprisingly, is a wild man.  Patrick Swayze’s character is trying to make the father he’ll never know proud.  Robert Stack and Gene Hackman represent the older generation, still trying to come to terms with everything that was lost in Vietnam and still mourning their sons.  The raid on the POW camp is exciting but it doesn’t feature the type of superhuman action that’s present in other POW-rescue films.  Col. Rhodes and his soldiers are ordinary men.  Not all of them survive and not all of them get what they want.

Uncommon Valor started out as a screenplay from Wings Hauser, though he’s not present in the cast of the final film and he was only given a “story” credit.  John Milius served as producer. Director Ted Kotcheff is best-known for First Blood, another action film about America’s struggle to come to terms with the Vietnam War.