Great War on Terror Films that Never Were

Does anyone remember that remarkable scene in Rambo IV: Holy War when Stallone, as the aging John Rambo, caught up with Bin Laden and engaged him in a brutal knife fight? Remember the line just before Rambo shoves his blade into Bin Laden's brisket? "Say hi to the seventy two virgins!"

I should be surprised if you did, since that movie never got made. It's true that in the wake of 9/11 Sylvester Stallone shopped around an idea for Rambo IV in which his signature character goes on the hunt in the wilds of Afghanistan for the perpetrator of the worse terror attack in history. But Hollywood wasn't interested. At last glance, John Rambo is going to go after Burmese pirates. Nasty folks, I'm sure, well worthy of Rambo's particular form of peace making. But kind of obscure compared to Islamo Fascists.

How about that great scene in the epic film Mazar il Sharrif when the Delta Force guys, mounted on horse back, engaged a Taliban position in a cavalry charge that was right out of John Ford? Sorry, but that film, once a James Cromwell project, also never got made.

Or how but those scene of intense house to house fighting as the Marines battled terrorists in that Harrison Ford flick, No True Glory? It's in, last we checked, what Hollywood calls development hell. That means that it's not likely to get made.

It's amazing. The smoke had barely cleared above the wreckage of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, almost sixty six years ago, when Hollywood at that time had started cranking out movies depicting heroic Americans slaughtering droves of Axis villains. Most the those films were horrible and don't really stand up, even though we still agree that the Nazis and the Japanese were evil and we were good. A few, like Casablanca, will live forever.

Hollywood has done a handful of good films about 9/11. The Showtime TV film, DC:9/11, United 93, and the Oliver Stone project, World Trade Center. But for the most part, Tinseltown has been AWOL in the War on Terror.