The giggling general.
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 second chance in life.
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!