Well sadly I couldn't get the movie I wanted to watch today, so I had to go to a back up which was
Red Dawn. The premise at least sounded good. It's the start of World War III and Soviet forces invade America and a small group of civilians escape and take up arms to fight back. It has a decent looking cast too, with Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Grey and Lea Thompson. If you don't know who they all are, I'll fill you in on the other side of the jump.
The story sounds pretty good so far doesn't it? Well I left out one small detail. The group of civilians is a group of children and teens. Lead by the eldest, Jed (Patrick Swayze) and his younger brother Matt (Charlie Sheen), the group of approximately 6 teens use bows and arrows at first to kill a small scouting party. With that they get guns and some ammo, and they keep using guerrilla tactics to take out increasingly larger groups until they're taking out entire squads of 20+ soldiers and vehicles. There's not much to the story other than this small group trying to take back their town. Can they do it?
Obviously this is an absurd story, but I was hoping for some good acting from the 4 most recognizable teens. Everyone knows Patrick Swayze (
Ghost) and Charlie Sheen (
Major League). You would recognize Lea Thompson from all the
Back to the Future movies, and Jennifer Grey was in
Dirty Dancing with Patrick Swayze. Sadly I really didn't get much in the way of acting at all from most of them. Most of the acting chops are given to Swayze, but the movie was just so bad I couldn't connect with him at all and I just didn't buy it.
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| Jennifer Grey and Lea Thompson are ready for World War III |
Most of the movie is dedicated to action scenes with lots of shooting and explosions. This should be a really good thing, if they shooting wasn't so fake. One of the girls is always on a turret mounted machine gun, and when she fires it, she's basically just shaking it with her hands! I half expected to see them making gun noises with their mouths as they fired. On the plus side, they seemed to have a lot of military vehicles in this from helicopters to jet fly-bys, tanks of several types and APCs and trucks. They even had a big scene towards the end with these huge white helicopters with missiles and machine guns. Too bad it never fired any of the missiles, but the guns did well. It's clear most of the budget for this movie was spent on the vehicles and possible building the extra stuff in the town like barracks and watch towers. Too bad nothing was spend on the story.
There were a few good, but short moments when a pilot is shot down over the forest and the kids take him in. He tells them stories of what the war is like and what it's like in other parts of America. Which cities were nuked and which had been infiltrated by Cuban forces, and which were taken over by Russian. There's even an attempt to explain how the war moved across America, but the description and explanation wasn't clear to me. But maybe I was just zoning out because everything else was so bad.
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| Swayze, some kid, and Sheen keep a look out for supplies |
It looks like this is going to be a shorter review. I've pretty
much said all there is I can say. The acting was bad, the story was
almost non-existent, and the action pretty much sucked and was nonsense
the whole time. Then the how the whole movie ends abruptly and fades to a point where it's clear America won the war. I actually found it really annoying though because there's very little closure at all at the end. Oh yeah, and the best part of the ending is that the Cuban general has Swayze and Sheen dead to rights, but then suddenly feels sorry for them and lets them go. Oh, I guess that was a spoiler... well I don't care, cause the movie was garbage anyways. The point is that he NEVER would have let them go after they've blown up so much stuff and killed so many of his men. The whole thing was just bad. Avoid it completely.
Since I was a kid when this movie came out and my grandpa was a big cold-war guy (He has tons of books on the subject. Probably had a bomb shelter he didn't talk about too), so I was able to relate to this movie quite a bit when it came out. (Oh yea I lived very close to Strategic Air Command too, so we'd have been a primary target to be nuked, so there is that.)
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt that it IS just as bad as you say, but it's place in my childhood memory will be hard to shake. Of course I've not seen it in awhile either.
Of course the movie is being remade (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234719/), this time it's the Chinese. I don't expect it to be a lot better really. At least the budget should be bigger.
That's interesting about the remake because in the original they mention that the Chinese are our allies. They also imply that about 400,000 Chinese had died by that point. As I said, the soldier's stories of the war around the world were the only interesting parts.
ReplyDeleteI had to watch clips of this film in my highschool film class. We only watched clips because my teacher thought the movie was too corny to watch in its entirety.
ReplyDeleteYou have to admit that the premise is a bit far-fetched. I could not honestly think of a plausible way the Soviets could invade rural America without having to deal with the American military in more populated areas that they would have to get past to get to the rural areas.
I have a feeling that since I'm a Canadian that didn't really experience the Cold War that I can't really see the reason this is a "cult classic".