EASTERN CONDORS Blu-ray Review: A Love Letter to Sammo Hung

It's a Hong Kong take on a classic Hollywood trope: the men-on-a-mission movie.

More specifically, Sammo Hung's 1987 film, Eastern Condors, falls into the Suicide Squad subgenre, in which a bunch of convicts, imprisoned in the United States, are set free with one proviso: they have to infiltrate Vietnam and destroy an American weapons cache left behind at the end of the war.

The mission gets called off as soon as the convicts' boots touch the ground. They keep going anyway. Of course they do: this, too, is a requirement of the genre.

Hong Kong filmmaker Hung was already an established commodity by 1987; he credits himself with kicking off the "hopping vampire" trend that overtook Chinese cinema in the early 1980s. With Eastern Condors, he set his ambitions on something broadly rousing, if less comic than some of his earlier efforts.

The plot -- if you've ever seen this kind of movie before, you have a rough sense of how it's going to go -- is little more than a piano wire upon which to hang a series of outsize set pieces, each accomplished with practical stunts and effects, and most of which leave your jaw firmly bruised from its impact with the ground.

The gang of miscreants, none of whom are wearing plot armour, fight their way across the country (actually, it's the Phillipines), doing battle with an endlessly replenishing supply of North Vietnamese bad guys -- getting shot, blown up, punched, and (in at least two cases) killed while taking a piss, as larger battles explode to life around them. They eventually square off against the "Giggling General," a freaky weirdo (and martial arts master, naturally) who -- you guessed it -- tends to snicker every time he does anything dastardly, which is lots.

Our heroes are joined by three Cambodian women guerillas for sex appeal, who are introduced in the most badass attack sequence I've ever seen, as Hung cuts back and forth between their staccato flurries of action and an extreme-slow-motion long shot of a single character charging relentlessly forward.

Further -- in fact, greater -- sex appeal rolls up in the form of a local black marketeer in a louche coat and scarf (Yuen Biao), who (again, naturally) turns out to be a hell of a kung fu fighter.

Regretfully, he loses the coat and scarf pretty much as soon as he agrees to join the squad, but otherwise he's a spirited addition to the troupe, high-kicking his way into and out of trouble as if it were his job. The whole cast is a murderers' row of Hong Kong stunt choreographers, performers, and directors, including Yuen Wo-Ping and Corey Yuen, and it shows in the sweaty enthusiasm with which the performers attack each sequence.

There's a weirdly meta sequence in the middle where the gang is taken prisoner and act out a variation on the Russian roulette sequence from Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, only with goopier practical effects. A different stunt sequence sees two soldiers ejected from a skiff in ultra-slow-mo mere heartbeats before the script is blown to smithereens by a bomb.

It's all impressive work, and it pops off the screen in the new 2K master; you don't miss the UHD on this disc, which gives a seamless film image while still retaining plenty of grotty old grain, endemic to the source.

Hung, who gives an animal intensity in his every scene, slowly takes over the centre of the picture as other characters fall away; for a star turn from the director-slash-stunt-choreographer, though, it's all much more matter-of-fact and egoless than, say, the recent extravehicular adventures of Mr. Tom Cruise.

The special features on the Criterion disc serve up an intro to the triple-threat's career. Eastern Condors is only the second of his films to join the Criterion Collection (the first, My Lucky Stars, was part of the recent Jackie Chan boxed set), so a pair of supplemental features see Hung outlining his life in film, from his time as a stunt performer on A Touch of Zen to his choreography on Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time.

The supplemental features then drill down on Eastern Condors itself with featurettes recorded in 2001, along with a Tony Rayns commentary recorded for this release. There's also an English-dubbed version of the feature, four minutes shorter than the original, available as an alternate video track.

The most surprising supplement on the disc is Eastern Condors: Live!, recorded at the 1987 Miss Asia Pageant, in which "the results of the pageant have been lost in enemy-occupied territory in Indochina" and the film's cast comes onstage to perform a kind of mixed modern-dance / fire-twirling / kung fu exhibition.

It's not quite Eastern Condors On Ice, but with the glittering backdrops and balletic physical action, it's close. It also does a superb job of putting the final point on the "shot for real" virtues of the fisticuffs and battle sequences throughout the film.