Eastern Condors (1987) – DVD

Dung fong tuk ying
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS)
starring Sammo Hung, Yuen Woo Ping, Mina Joyce Godenzi, Yuen Wah
screenplay by Barry Wong
directed by Sammo Hung

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "It's The Dirty Dozen meets Rambo meets Apocalypse Now!" screams the back cover of the Sammo Hung vehicle Eastern Condors, and that's true–the film caters to all of your war/Vietnam film needs, managing to be completely parasitic of the abovementioned pictures while throwing in scenes from The Deer Hunter at no extra charge. Unfortunately, Eastern Condors doesn't also manage to be as good as any of its sources. An incongruous pairing of heavy combat violence and chirpy innocent characters, it's completely divided against itself: the wafer-thin plot renders the often impressive action scenes null while the scale of these set-pieces wipes the piddling stick-figure characters straight off the screen. And though the resulting tinny irritant is too penny-ante to be painful, the film's petty annoyances far outweigh its limited and meagre virtues.

It's the mid-'70s, and the Yanks are pulling out of Vietnam. In their haste, they've made a few oversights–like leaving behind a massive munitions dump primed and ready to fall into the proverbial wrong hands. Thus a mission is hatched in order to destroy it–that is, to send in a group of…Chinese convicts. Promised freedom if they carry out the dangerous mission, the group, led by the redoubtable Mr. Hung, rendezvous with a group of cute female resistance fighters and team up with a black marketeer in order to find and destroy the munitions. But the terrain is dangerous, laden as it is with Viet Cong soldiers and the occasional treacherous crew member, ensuring much intrigue between action numbers.

But not, as it turns out, enough. Taken as a narrative, Eastern Condors has almost nothing to recommend it. It's a jerrybuilt collection of clichés practically coughed up by the scenarist, patched together with the excuse that nobody's here for plot, anyway. We're therefore regaled with several inane subplots, from the general (the usual bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission camaraderie) to the specific (selfless wounded fighters soldiering on regardless), peppered with swipes from the films already cited. The characters, meanwhile, are practically indistinguishable from each other–and the ones that can be distinguished are such grotesque caricatures that you're not sure you want to notice them. Consequently, nothing in the movie is convincing on any level, destroying any chance that you might get caught up in the plight of the hapless leads.

I can hear somebody chiding me for not getting into the spirit of the movie. No one goes to a Sammo Hung movie for the sparkling repartee, they go for stunts and lots of 'em. Indeed, the film is chock-full of things exploding and kung fu exchanges for all of those people for whom such things are enough. But without anything to invest in, these sometimes-elaborate exchanges carry no weight–they're so huge that they topple the house of cards that is the plot and deny the film any human feeling at all. Watching the film's action scenes is like trying to read a book while a housefly buzzes around your head–the constant distraction breaks your concentration and keeps you from getting involved. Note to Sammo Hung: it's never a good thing to have a script that can be likened to a filthy insect in need of a swatting.

THE DVD
Fox and Fortune Star release Eastern Condors in an anamorphically enhanced 2.35:1 transfer whose colours lack lustre and definition is a little flat; for the most part, this doesn't really detract from the experience–and as Bill Chambers has pointed out about another Fortune Star title, it's a great deal better than the funky dubs for which HK action fans have long had to settle. Two remixed Cantonese soundtracks grace the disc, one in DD 5.1 and one in DTS, with the edge definitely going to the latter. While the DD mix does its best with a limited source, throwing a few gunshots into the surround channels, there's a slight tinniness to the audio and the sense that the various elements exist in some sort of aural isolation. The DTS track has a rounder sound and a more harmonious integration of music, dialogue, and effects, though it can't entirely triumph over the limited source material. (This is still a foreign-market Eighties movie, after all.) The film's trailers–both vintage and new–round out the package.

97 minutes; R; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, Cantonese DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1, Cantonese DTS 5.1; English (optional) subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox