Eastern Condors

If you only know Sammo Hung for his more happy-go-lucky roles, then Eastern Condors will be a massive shock to the system, going as far as to tread into John Woo's territory of heroic bloodshed. Taking the idea of The Dirty Dozen but setting it in Vietnam, Sammo got serious with this one, even cutting his trademark hair and slimming right down. There are no mincing words about how brutally violent Eastern Condors gets... Hands get chopped off, Vietcong kids play Russian Roulette and people are shot point blank with no hesitation, in the wrong hands it's distasteful stuff, but Sammo treats it all with sincerity, marking this film out as one of his finest accomplishments as an actor, martial artist and director.

Although the majority of the action is hyper-intense gun fights occasionally punctuated by a familiar moment seen in Western war films like The Deer Hunter or the Rambo franchise, there is a spectacular final bout of full-contact fisticuffs for the patient ones among you. The cast is populated by plenty of familiar names and faces, although I do wish they got a bit more characterisation outside of their nicknames and who plays them, they all commit often coming away bloody and bruised from the hyper-dangerous stunt work. For better or worse, Eastern Condors has a gritty edge that makes it truly stand out amongst Sammo's filmography often feeling like what Heroes Shed No Tears had originally wanted to be, it's an absolute must-see!

In the early 90s, after reading a glowing review of the film in a fanzine, I shelled out mucho dinero for a pirated un-subtitled VHS copy of Eastern Condors. And even though I didn't have a clue what was being said, the movie blew me away with its OTT gung-ho action, bullet-riddled battle scenes and unbelievable martial arts madness.

These days the film is available on DVD remastered, fully restored and subtitled, so fans of fantastic fight action have no excuse for not checking out this marvellous movie.

Director and star Sammo Hung takes the basic plot of The Dirty Dozen (a group of criminals take part in a dangerous mission with the promise of freedom if they succeed), adds a touch of The Deer Hunter and Rambo, and throws in a ton of amazing kung fu to deliver one of the best Hong Kong flicks of the 80s.

Joining Sammo on his dangerous mission (into Vietnam, to destroy a hidden US munitions dump) are the brilliant Yuen Baio (as a Vietnamese profiteer dealing in smuggled goods), Oscar winner Haing S. Ngor, Lam Ching Ying, Yuen Woo-ping, Corey Yuen, Charlie Chin, and Sammo's real-life wife, the gorgeous Joyce Godenzi. Playing nasty bad-guys out to foil the mission are Billy Chow and the fantastic Yuen Wah. With a line up like that, and Hung calling the shots, excellence is almost guaranteed.

From the moment our 'heroes' parachute into a Vietcong infested jungle, Eastern Condors is non stop brutal action and unmissable fare for those who enjoy their war films violent and unfettered by serious political comment. The bad guys are pure evil (Wah's sniggering fan-waving general is as despicable as they come) and deserve to die. End of story.

And die they do: blasted by machine guns, knifed to death in guerrilla attacks, hacked by machetes, and even killed by imaginative use of jungle flora! In a blistering finale in an underground, missile laden bunker, the surviving good-guys take on the enemy in a vicious showdown that will leave you breathless. Yuen Baio and Sammo take the spotlight in the final fight against Wah and Chow, and the result is some of the best martial arts action ever committed to film. Baio's acrobatic skills are well showcased, whilst Hung, who slimmed down in order to be able to perform more incredible stunts, is on particularly fine form.

Only the occasional 'silly' moment (such as the death of a stuttering character who dies when he fails to reach twenty before opening his parachute), and the rather strange nutter played by Haing S. Ngor (I'm still not sure what the point of his character was) stop me from giving this top marks.

But 9/10 is nothing to be sniffed at, and any fan of the genre should definitely check this one out.

'Eastern Condors (1987)' is a 'men on a mission' movie with a set up remarkably similar to that of 'The Suicide Squad (2021)'. A group of Asian prisoners incarcerated in the United States are offered a chance for freedom - and $200,000 - in exchange for their services on a clandestine mission in Vietnam. Set just after the war, the picture sees its rag-tag group of heroes search for a stockpile of abandoned US munitions in the hope of destroying it before the Vietnamese military can get their hands on it. In a fairly oblique way, it comments on the way in which the prison-industrial complex treats people - specifically minorities and immigrants - as expendable additions to the workforce, promising them a better life not by simply giving them the opportunity to thrive but instead by forcing them into a situation from which they likely won't return. This goes hand in hand with the way that vulnerable members of society are often pushed into the military in order to fight to further the economic interests of their government, done so under the guise of defending their country and their freedom. These deaths are considered noble because they are for a cause, but the cause itself is not as altruistic as it is made to appear. Of course, all of this is subtextual and the film itself doesn't necessarily feel as though it has any real intention of making some sort of grand statement. It's still an interesting aspect of its theming, though. Furthermore, the flick is never exactly patriotic, particularly because it offers an outside view of the American military - or at least an operation which is sanctioned by them. The main attraction is, of course, the exhilarating action, which ranges from firefights to fistfights and features just about everything in between. The film retains its war movie vibe even as it indulges in its martial arts movie mayhem, blending the two genres in a consistently exciting and generally cohesive way. It never feels like it's one pretending to be the other, instead that it's its own beast that outshines its inspirations in a lot of key ways. The chaos is all delightfully practical, remaining tangible and dangerous in each and every scene. The athleticism of the performers and the inventiveness of the choreographers are both on full display, even during the segments in which the film feels at its furthest from its director's comfort zone. Everything comes together in a rip-roaring finale that starts as a squib-triggering shootout, progresses to bone-crunching hand-to-hand combat, and then finishes things up with a ginormous explosion that practically singes your eyebrows through the screen. It's a fantastic climax that leans into the filmmakers' strengths, putting Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao front and centre as they show off their amazing-as-ever action chops against a surprisingly ferocious final foe. Ultimately, this is a really good Kung Fu war movie with a memorable cast of outcast characters and several exhilarating set-pieces. It's definitely worth watching.

This Hong Kong action film is set shortly after the end of the Vietnam War. The American forces have left behind large stockpiles of weapons and want them destroyed before the Vietcong get their hands on them. To this end an entirely deniable group of convicts of Chinese ancestry is recruited and parachuted into Vietnam where they meet with a trio of female Cambodian guerrillas and two Vietnamese men they have been asked to rescue. As they head towards the target they encounter several groups of Vietcong. It will be a tough mission for them and not all of them will survive.

This might not be the best film concerned with the Vietnam War but it is still rather fun. There are plenty of nods to other films; the plot is clearly inspired by 'The Dirty Dozen' and one scene is from 'The Deer Hunter'... this isn't a problem though. There is plenty of action; this includes shooting, explosions and lots of impressive martial arts. There is also a degree of humour, although this doesn't get in the way of the drama. The acting is solid; most obviously from Sammo Hung, who also directed. Other notable performances come from Haing S. Ngor as mad uncle Lung Yeung and Joyce Godenzi as the leader of the Cambodian guerrillas. Overall I'd certainly recommend this to fans of martial arts action and war films.

These comments are based on watching the film in Cantonese with English subtitles.

I wasn't sure why this film didn't work as well for me as with other films with and by Sammo Hung. It's a Hong Kong version of The Dirty Dozen, collect a group of criminals and send them on a suicide mission in Vietnam. There's a reason why The Dirty Dozen is 2h 30min long, it spends half of its time introducing each of the characters and make you actually care about them when it's time for the actual mission. This film throws us right into the mission with a quick introduction of each character with a freeze frame and a letters printing out their name and the crime they're in prison for. You can also tell that this film is much more serious than Sammo's other films, still, there's a really strange kind of comedy throughout the film, one with a stuttering prisoner that made me cringe a bit and also the Lucky Star actor Charlie Chin, constantly flirting with the ladies.

But what we lose in plot, we get back in the action. The usage of firearms reminds me more of films like Rambo: First Blood Part II or Commando, loads of shooting, very macho and big guns in each arm while they kept on killing enemies. I couldn't say I cared too much how much firepower was used during the film, it somehow felt wrong to see Sammo shoot his enemies with guns. But we also get lots of martial art in the film and when Yuen Biao joins the gang as a local vietnamese who happens to be just as amazing at fighting as Sammo. The Killing Fields' Haing S. Ngor have a small role in the film as well, but I felt like the film didn't know how to use him, so his role was sadly forgotten in the end for what could've brought some more depth to it.

If you could rate different acts of the film alone, the third act is what would get 10 out of 10 stars from me, introducing late in the film the Giggling General (yes, he's named that here on imdb too) played by Wah Yuen, an actor I usually relate to comedies like Kung Fu Hustle, but here he's really creepy, and that giggling starts as something silly and funny soon turns into something very scary and dangerous. The extended fight scene between him and Yuen and Sammo gave me goosebumps, it was amazingly choreographed and the part where you could see Sammo's directing pay off the most.

Sadly the first acts drags the films rating down for me, but watch it for the final fight, it's well worth it. And like pretty much all other 80's HK action films, this one is just over 90 minutes long so it's a quick watch.