Eastern Condors (1987) | Movie Review | Hong Kong | Sammo Hung and friends fight the Viet Cong
A
group of prisoners from Hong Kong is sent
to Vietnam to destroy a weapons depot.
But Viet Cong soldiers are standing in their
way.
Eastern Condors has an impressive cast where
we find some of the best action actors in
the world at the time.
Sammo Hung is the director, and he also stars
in the movie.
He has brought with him the fantastic and
my favorite, Yuen Biao, the acrobatic master.
But damn, what a fucking annoying hairstyle
he has here!
And it seems like he thinks he’s cool with
this hairstyle!
Another favorite of mine is Yuen Wah.
He steals the whole movie in the few minutes
he’s in.
What a wonderful, creepy, giggling man!
Eastern Condors offers fewer action scenes
than expected.
There’s a lot of talking.
The humor is mostly terrible, except for the
stuttering man that never deploys his parachute
because he’s still counting when he hits
the ground.
That’s so stupid and funny!
The annoying characters kill a lot of the
pace and enjoyment.
There are many characters in Eastern Condors,
but you don’t care about them at all, which
is probably the meaning when most of them
are convicts who get a
The problem is that most of the characters
have a very annoying personality, and the
dramaturgy is terrible.
It feels like Sammo Hung is sincere with the
dramaturgy when the so-called good guys die
one after the other.
But they never deserve our sympathy when they
lie there dying.
And many of them keep talking just before
they die.
And the dialogue is pure shit!
This is dialogue from the deepest Hong Kong
hell!
Can someone make them shut up!
They talk and talk the whole movie!
Just die, fuckers!
When it’s time for action, we get to see
big explosions, acrobatics, gunfights, and
martial arts.
The silly thing is that there
are a lot of famous actors in Eastern Condors
that are playing Viet Cong soldiers.
The brilliant Yuen Wah plays a creepy, giggling,
general.
My God, this man is king!
And in his corner, we find Billy Lau, Dick
Wei, and Yasuaki Kurata.
We have a wild bunch of well-known actors
in this genre who play the bad guys, but they
get almost no screen time.
They only turn up at the end to fight.
Why couldn’t Sammo Hung have given them
more screen time, and cut the terrible humor
and the awful dialogue?
Should I describe Eastern Condors with one
word, it must be the word energetic when we
first get to see some action scenes.
The action scenes are hard-hitting in the
best Sammo Hung style.
It’s disappointing that the last fight scenes
with some of the best martial artists are
too short.
There are three fights they could have gotten
a lot out of, but they don’t last long enough.
It’s obvious that Sammo Hung wanted more
bullets and grenades than fists and kicks.
I understand him.
He wanted to try something new, and it’s
easy to understand when you have followed
his career for many years.
Variety is important.
I have seen Eastern Condors around 4-5 times.
It’s never going to be one of my favorite
movies.
The characters are so annoying, and the same
goes for the bad dialogue.
There’s not enough action scenes.
The reason for that is just so that the annoying
characters can spew out some terrible dialogue.
Shut up and die like real men!
In fact, I wish 90% of the good guys were
stuttering when they jumped out of the plane!
Then they would have all died early!
