If it wasn’t for a cadre of insanely talented martial artist/filmmakers who dragged the Kung-Fu genre out of the locked off, old school mindset, it was stubbornly mired in. Visionaries such as Summo Hung, Yuen Bio and Jackie Chan kept the high kicking artistry, but stated setting their epics in more contemporary times which had an immediate and profound effect on the genre.
Well, that’s the respectful, cinephile version – another massive benefit that some of the movies that rose out of this more modern mind set were absolutely and completely fucking insane as weird strings of comedy would find their way into movies that were set in the wildest places. A legendary pioneer of taking Kung-Fu into bizarre and fascinating places was the mighty Samo Hung – think that adding ghosts to the genre was utterly mental? Wait until you hear the synopsis for 1987s Eastern Condors – a movie that takes the basic concept of The Dirty Dozen and then pivots to a crazed Kung-Fu, Vietnam war movie. Yup, you read all that right.
Lieutenant Colonal Lam is a Hong Kong- American officer who is in charge of a delicate mission named Operation Condor that’s been put in place in order to get a team into 1976 Vietnam just after the war has ended to stop the Viet Cong from finding an abandoned American bunker and blow it up. However, due to the mission being shockingly dangerous, twelve of the men selected are all Chinese American convicts with hefty prison sentences who have had freedom, a U.S. citizenship and $200,000 dangled in front of them in order to get them to sign up.
Among the group are their leader, the no-nonsense Tung Ming-sun and various other misfits who range from being too old, too negative or too inexperienced to last long in such a hostile environment and this is tragically proven even before the troops set foot on Vietnamese soil as they start gradually dropping like flies. However, padding out the group are a trio of female Cambodian guerillas and Rat Chieh, a local grifter with a fast tongue and even faster feet who ends up getting inadvertently thrown in with the group when things start to get hot. But as this rag tag group fight their way towards their goal, the biggest tragedy is that Lam got word that the mission had actually been called off the moment the last of his makeshift unit had leapt out of the plane to parachute into hell. This means no matter what, no matter what they face, these guys are on their own.
So what do they face? Well, hordes of heavily armed, Viet Cong troops for one thing, not to mention a creepy, giggling general and every vehicle and weapon he possesses; but on top of that, it soon becomes apparent that the group isn’t as tightly knit as you’d expect. Not only is there a turncoat among them, but ehen they actual reach the bunker, there’s a disagreement about whether or not all the plentiful weapons should be destroyed.
For those of you who think that making a movie about the conflict of Vietnam that’s shot through the hyperbolic prism of a Hong Kong action film an extremely disrespectful thing to do; they A) should probably steer well clear of Easten Condors and B) most likely haven’t seen John Woo’s similarly bombastic treatment of the war, Bullet In The Head. Still, for the rest of us, Hung delivers an appropriately savage spectacle that not only acts as a love letter to the men on a mission war films of the 50s and 60s, but also looks to emulate the thrills and spills of western 80s wartime excess, primarily that of Rambo: First Blood Part 2. It’s to everyone’s credit that it not only matches the other films I’ve name dropped so far, but in some cases, actually succeeds in besting them thanks to its truly bewildering mixture of tense thrills, an exhilarating over abundance of military ordinance that would even make Predator sweat and some truly eye-popping acts of martial arts that are genuinely bruising as they are utterly stunning.
The extended cast means that quite a few familiar faces are present from such other Hung epics such as My Lucky Stars and the phenomenal Dragons Forever and Encounters Of The Spooky Kind with many of them reprising very similar roles. Frequent acrobatic collaborator, Yuen Biao, is on hand in a typically wild card type of character that initially has nothing to do with anything, but soon finds himself dealing out jaw dropping acts of blunt force trauma to members of the Viet Cong army. Joining him is the permanently set jaw of Yan Ching-ying as another forthright and uptight heroic figure of authority and Yuen Wah playing the exact same type of skinny, spectacled villianous creep he did in Dragon’s Forever except that instead of intensely puffing on cigars, he futters a fan and giggles before laying out a surprisingly spirited beat down.
However, while many are familiar with Samo Hung as a leading man of impressive, comedic talents, here his character is more of a serious type, laying off overt slapstick and cracks about his iconic weight in favour of portraying his lead as a far more sober type. Of course, that doesn’t mean that he’s any calmer when it comes to beating the merry hell out of his enemies – in fact, when he’s not scaling trees with knives in order to drop on his victims from above, he’s out doing John Rambo’s talents of jungle based fatality takedowns by impressively managing to assassinate soldiers with a fucking leaf. No, I’m not going to explain how – mainly because I don’t think I can. In fact, Eastern Condors is way more explicitly violent than some of its contemporaries, opting less for simple knockouts via a roundhouse kick and more for moments where one of female members of the group kills an enemy combatant by stabbing them brutally in the butthole. However, despite the frequent viciousness of the film and the fact that a lot of the reluctant heroes end up having the life expectancy of your average kidnapper from a Liam Neeson film, Eastern Condors is surprisingly light. Sure there’s tragic deaths and selfless sacrifices aplenty, yet Hung doesn’t seem at all interested in using his movie to make any sort of statement about the Vietnam war at all. In fact, while I would stop short of saying that the action epic is actually an action comedy, there’s a hell of a lot of chuckles than you’d expect for a film like this and it’s tone isn’t far off from Hung’s other movies as it sticks it’s tongue in its cheek while it’s shoving a grenade in the mouth of its villains and pulls the pin.
While the horrors of the Vietnam war might seem a strange place to set a kick ass Kung-Fu fight fest, the ever-innovative Samo Hung delivers a massively entertaining action classic that counts being staggeringly exciting and frequently unpredictable as its main mission goals. But while some of those wild plot swings tend to flail a little bit (many of the characters are walking, talking, killing clichés), every punch and kick lands perfectly to deliver a genuine classic.
War is hell, yes – but under Hung’s watch, war is also hellaciously fucking awesome.
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