[3] The film stars Charlie Sheen, Michael Biehn, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Rick Rossovich, Cyril O'Reilly, Bill Paxton, and Dennis Haysbert.

Aircraft carrier USS Forrestal receives a mayday from a civilian cargo ship named Kuwaiti Star in the Mediterranean Sea.

A deployed Navy SH-3 helicopter attempts to rescue the crew, but is downed by a gunboat and the aircrew is captured by terrorists affiliated with Ben Shaheed.

Reacting to a suspicious noise, Hawkins breaks silence when he encounters Shaheed in an adjoining room, inadvertently alerting the terrorists.

The Joint Chiefs are briefed on the recent mission and Curran requests permission to destroy the Stingers, but Navy Intelligence has learned they have already been relocated.

Frustrated by the recent unreliable intelligence, Curran solicits journalist Claire Varrens's cooperation by giving her access to the SEAL training facilities.

Claire is initially wary but opens up to Curran after learning that a Stinger has been used to shoot down a peace delegation in Lebanon.

Inspired by this and an outburst by Hawkins, Curran presents the idea of kidnapping a potential informant to the Joint Chiefs at the National Security Council meeting.

When Ramos is pinned down by patrolling militia, Hawkins disobeys Curran's order to stay quiet and instigates a firefight, resulting in Graham's death.

Disguised as Lebanese militiamen, the SEALs are deployed to Beirut, entering via Zodiac rubber inflatable boats, this time to meet a local resistance fighter from the AMAL militia who will guide them to the building containing the Stingers.

Curran leads Leary and Rexer inside the building to destroy the missiles while Hawkins and Ramos maintain overwatch outside.

The exfiltration runs into complications: Curran is wounded, forcing the SEALS to commandeer a civilian car, prompting a pursuit by an enemy BTR-152 Armoured personnel carrier (APC).

In the winter of 1986 Brenda Feigen, then an agent at the William Morris Agency, was introduced to Chuck Pfarrer through one of her clients.

Pfarrer, an active-duty navy SEAL who wrote screenplays in his spare time, had just sold "The Crook Factory", a script about Ernest Hemingway's life.

After retiring from the SEALs, Pfarrer wrote the script, which Feigen shopped to Orion Pictures, Warner Brothers, and United Artists, hoping to create a bidding war.

Richard Marquand was then hired as director, but his death in 1987 stopped pre-production until Lewis Teague was brought in as a replacement.

What Teague wanted was for the SEALs to have to get Stinger missiles out of the control of Arab terrorists who were planning to blow up a planeload of innocent civilians.

[14] In November 1989, filming moved to Southern Spain, utilizing the Mediterranean ports of Tarifa, Cádiz, and Cartagena.

[25] Some reviews have been more positive: Allmovie notes that "viewers seeking rapidly paced action sequences will not be disappointed".

In 2024, boutique movie label Vinegar Syndrome released an fully restored Ultra HD Blu-ray featuring an all new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative.

[28] The film is lampooned in Clerks, when the character Randall complains about video store customers who "always pick the most intellectually devoid movies on the racks" and one is shown reacting excitedly to a tape of Navy SEALs.