The Pentagon wanted nothing to do with Uncommon Valor. The Department of Defense reportedly considered the script anti-government and refused to rent the production so much as a helicopter. So the filmmakers bought their own and repainted them. There’s something fitting about that workaround for a movie built around men deciding that if the government won’t do the job, they’ll do it themselves.

Director Ted Kotcheff was coming off First Blood, and Uncommon Valor reached theaters before Missing in Action and Rambo: First Blood Part II turned the search for American POWs into an entire ’80s action subgenre. In that sense, this is where Hollywood’s MIA rescue cycle really gets moving.

The movie opens during the final chaos of Vietnam, with men left behind as the last helicopter pulls away. Ten years later, retired Marine Colonel Jason Rhodes (Gene Hackman, The French Connection) remains convinced that his son is alive somewhere in Laos. Washington has stopped listening. Rhodes hasn’t stopped looking. He finally finds an ally in Texas oil tycoon MacGregor (Robert Stack, Joe Versus the Volcano), whose own son disappeared on the same day. MacGregor has the money. Rhodes has the plan. What they need next are the men willing to go back.

That recruiting stretch is where Uncommon Valor really starts cooking, because Kotcheff has one hell of a team to assemble. Wilkes (Fred Ward, Tremors) is the guy you want moving quietly through the jungle. Sailor (Randall “Tex” Cobb, Raising Arizona) looks like a bar fight learned to walk. Blaster (Reb Brown, Big Wednesday) handles explosives, while Johnson (Harold Sylvester, Innerspace) and Charts (Tim Thomerson, Fade to Black) know their way around the air. Kevin Scott (Patrick Swayze, Dirty Dancing) is the eager new guy with something to prove. Then there’s Hackman holding all of them together. A former Marine himself, he gives Rhodes exactly the right mix of command and desperation. He can bark an order with the best of them, but you never lose sight of the father underneath the colonel. He isn’t chasing glory or another war. He wants his son back.

Structurally, there aren’t many surprises. Recruit the team, train the team, send the team in. You can practically feel each checkpoint coming. The action itself favors stunt work, gunfire and quick cutting over anything especially gritty, and later movies would push this exact fantasy much harder. What keeps Uncommon Valor from feeling disposable is the people carrying it. These aren’t anonymous commandos waiting for their heroic death scenes. They’re older men with jobs, families, regrets and memories they never completely escaped. Going back means reopening wounds most of them have spent a decade trying to live around.

Kotcheff referred to Vietnam veterans as the country’s “forgotten men,” and that idea gives the movie more feeling than its rah-rah rescue premise might suggest. Even the expected training sequences have a little melancholy hanging over them. These guys know exactly what they’re volunteering to revisit. Producer John Milius reportedly did some uncredited dialogue work, and you can almost hear him whenever the movie gets especially angry. Rhodes’ speech about Washington treating its soldiers like a bankrupt business certainly has his fingerprints all over it.

None of this makes Uncommon Valor unpredictable. It just makes the formula work better than it has any right to.