God bless the eighties, where you could get away with completely over the top jingoistic melodrama like this with a reasonably straight face. Stuff like Rambo II, Invasion USA and the John Milius (he of Conan The Barbarian fame) film Red Dawn could really only be done in the Golden Age of the Action Movie. In fact, consider my shock and horror that this was NOT a Canon film, but a MGM movie. Seriously, Patriotic twaddle like this is right up Yoram and Menahem's alley.

We open in a Podunk no-name Wyoming town as a bunch of high school students see a ton of paratroopers dropping onto their front lawn. They quickly figure out that something is amiss when the teacher gets blown away by the godless commie pinkos. It seems that the Evil Ruskies have successfully dropped The Big One in a sneak attack first strike against the Lone Bastion of Freedom and have joined forces with equally evil Cubans and Nicaraguans to storm the front gates of Liberty!

As the Reds gun down good, god fearing Americans, a group of good looking teenagers hop in a pickup truck, grab a vast array of weaponry from their assorted gun racks and - quite literarily - head for the hills. Leading the pack is Jed Eckert (Patrick "My way or the Highway" Swayze) and his younger brother Matt (Charlie "Five girls at once. It was a pile-up" Sheen), their buddies Robert (C. Thomas Howell) Erica (Lea "that is your name? Calvin Klein? It's written all over your underwear" Thompson) and Toni (Jennifer "Baby" Grey), along with handful of no-name actors that nobody has seen or heard from since.

Adopting the name of their high school football mascot, the Wolverines proceed to sabotage Soviet equipment, save helpless townsfolk from execution and rape, harass the enemy at every chance they get and generally plot to take America back from the Red Menace.

On the surface, this seems like a pretty hard movie to screw up - kick much commie ass, fire tons of ammo, wave the flag a couple of times, save the girl, and it's all "America, Fuck yeah!" in the end. The problem is that the movie is maddeningly uneven. It starts out strong with some pretty solid action (and darkly humorous moments - like the bumper sticker that says "They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers" followed by a shot of a Russian soldier taking a gun from an American’s cold dead fingers) but after the explosive and interesting opening, the movie grinds to a halt with half an hour of the Wolverines arguing if they should puss out and surrender to the commies, Wolverines crying their eyes out over dead relatives, and Wolverines getting all Lord of the Flies as they hunt and kill a deer and then drink it's blood as a rite of passage into manhood.

When the Teenage rebels begin their guerrilla attacks on the Russkies, the film actually builds some momentum and begins to spark some interest. This momentum quickly evaporates when it becomes clear that they’re not actually any headway against the enemy. When it looks like the Wolverines will incite the indigenous population to rise up against the Red Menace in a 300-esque blaze of glory, suddenly we're back up in the woods having a heartfelt chat around the campfire. Just after the Wolverines find a downed fighter jock, Milius pulls things back and gives us a creepy and completely unnecessary love interest between said 40 year old fighter jock and a 15 year old teenage girl. Um, can we get back to killin' the commies now?

The other problem is that the film desperately needs a good villain. Oh sure we get Ron O'Neal as a Cuban commander of the communist forces - the only character on the Bad Guy side that's even remotely fleshed out, a former freedom fighter back home, doing to the enemy what the Wolverines are doing to him and his men now - but he has no teeth. When you squandering Superfly on a wuss roll like this, you know something's gone horribly, horribly wrong. And when you piss away a seminal B-movie heavy like William Smith, cast as a stone cold Commie badass named Strelnikov, well that's just criminal.

And so the movie spins its wheels for the next hour, while the occasional Wolverine dies and there's some "Did he sell us out!" double-dealing, nothing much happens. Couldn’t they have at least tried to free the townsfolk and start an underground railroad to the Free America? That would have at least made Superfly’s moral dilemma over being a Jackbooted Heavy for the new Communist Regime rather than a freedom fighter somewhat relevant instead of simply tacked on as an afterthought.

And then, to make matters worse? We get a climax where Swayze and Sheen pretty much throw away their lives in a desperate and ineffectual kamikaze mission and the denouement - the liberation of American and the defeat of the evil commies once and for all - happens in a voiceover over a picture of a memorial. In short, all the cool stuff we've waited for the whole movie happens off-screen. Gee thanks.

So, yeah - it's a rare movie when I say that the film suffers for not being a cheesy b-movie, a Canon Films jingoistic special. If it had been Swayze and Sheen behind enemy lines with two machine guns blazing, killing commie pinkos left, right and center, and single handedly saving the world from the Red Menace, the film would have been a hundred percent better. Sure it wouldn’t have been realistic in the slightest, but at least it wouldn’t have been a whiny cry-baby version of 300.

THE DVD -
There are two editions of Red Dawn - an older edition from 4 or 5 years ago and a more recent 25th anniversary edition. The older version sports a non-anamorphic print that looks ok, but not outstanding. It's washed out with really flat colors. It serves to emphasize the Colder-than-hell winter that the resistance had to endure, but it looks lackluster.

THE EXTRAS -
The older edition (the one I have) only sports a trailer for the extras. There's a special edition out with a second disc full of commentaries and documentaries and whatnot, so unless you find the old version for a buck, go get that one instead.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
Red Dawn could have been so much fun if they had delivered something completely over the top, cheesy and jingoistic. Instead we get way too much Teen Angst and whining and not nearly enough Commie ass kicking action.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older