Eastern Condors: Collective Action

Eastern Condors marked yet another important shift in his style. Whereas Hung’s previous movie, Millionaires’ Express (1986), was an all-star farce—alternating among slapstick goofiness, remarkable fight sequences, and some of the most impressive images of men jumping off buildings ever captured on film—Eastern Condors showed the director mostly abandoning his trademark silliness in favor of the sober approach he felt the movie’s war theme deserved. In keeping with this newfound rigor, he subsisted on a diet of only white rice and skinless chicken for three months to transform his body for his screen role—a strong, silent warrior quite unlike the pudgy funnymen he had played before.

Set in 1976 and primarily shot in the Philippines, Eastern Condors follows a squad of U.S. convicts sent to Vietnam to blow up a hidden arsenal left behind by the American military when it pulled out of Vietnam a few years earlier. The members of the crew, which consists mostly of undocumented immigrants from Hong Kong (though some members are part Vietnamese and one is Malaysian), have been promised citizenship and a lot of money for their participation. In a darkly comic variation on the bureaucratic neglect depicted in the Rambo series, their mission is aborted just before the lieutenant (Lam Ching-ying) parachutes into the jungle, but he and his main comrade (Hung) decide to carry on anyway, without telling the rest of the team—who are at odds almost from the start—about the change in plans.

Hung allows ample time for the actors to shine, through action, camaraderie, or sheer force of will. The cast is packed with notable figures from the world of Chinese-language cinema, including Yuen Biao and Corey Yuen; Yuen Wo-ping, whose accomplishments as an action director rival Hung’s own; Charlie Chin, a star of Taiwanese romantic dramas in the 1970s; Billy Lau, known for his supremely obnoxious performances in the Mr. Vampire series; and, in the most bizarre casting move of Hung’s career, Dr. Haing S. Ngor.

Born in Cambodia, where he was trained as a gynecologist and obstetrician, Ngor had escaped after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in the late seventies, after which he starred in The Killing Fields, winning Best Supporting Actor at the 1985 Academy Awards. That in less than a decade he went from the threat of death amid a genocide to a featured role in a Sammo Hung movie is one of the strangest facts in late-twentieth-century film history. In Eastern Condors, Ngor plays an American serviceman who was left behind after the end of the war and has since gone crazy. The film’s most disturbing sequence mixes the actor’s iconography with an allusion to the famous Russian-roulette scene in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, twisting the reference by having children play the soldiers in charge of the game. Shot in close-up, Ngor, gun pressed to his head, calls to mind Eddie Adams’s 1968 photograph Saigon Execution—as if the spirit of the brutalized Vietnamese subject in that iconic image has been transposed onto an actor with an eerily intimate relationship to the kind of violence being staged on-screen.

In scenes like this, Eastern Condors is shockingly bleak. Throughout the movie, death seems to come at random. The first squad member dies when he fails to open his parachute, in a grim and tasteless joke involving his stutter. Others perish heroically: Charlie Chin meets his fate at the hands of a child he has spared; Corey Yuen and Yuen Wo-ping, in a particularly touching moment, hold each other close as they attempt to stop the Vietnamese army from advancing across a bridge and ultimately bleed to death. This ominous streak had occasionally shown up in Hung’s previous work, but it became prominent here—and in his 1989 film Pedicab Driver—marking a turn toward seriousness that coincided with his increasing ambition as an actor. Over the next two years, he gave his two finest dramatic performances: in Alex Law’s Painted Faces, in which Hung plays martial artist Yu Jim-yuen (one of his teachers at the China Drama Academy), and in Mabel Cheung’s Eight Taels of Gold, a romance that pairs him with the great actor-writer-director Sylvia Chang.

Eastern Condors isn’t entirely downbeat, and Hung’s openness as a director leads him to thrilling moments of ingenuity, including a sequence in which Hung uses a coconut leaf as a makeshift projectile launcher—a trick he picked up from watching some of the film’s extras goofing around during a break. Traces of slapstick and dark humor clash with the more somber passages, and for Western audiences unfamiliar with how Hong Kong directors often pack every possible kind of emotion and plot twist into their films, the movie’s tonal shifts may seem abrupt. Still, by Hung’s standards, Eastern Condors is remarkably restrained.

The final showdown is one of Hung’s most spectacular achievements, playing out in a vast, multilevel armory, with the editing and choreography always perfectly orienting the audience to the spatial relations of the actors and their environment. The surviving members of the team, arriving at the arsenal at last, are almost immediately surrounded by the Vietnamese army, led by three actors who have played some of the greatest kung-fu villains of all time: Dick Wei, Billy Chow, and, in maybe the finest showcase of his long career, Yuen Wah. Yuen began working in film shortly after Hung did, and he specialized in villains, playing memorable ones in Jackie Chan’s Police Story 3: Supercop and Corey Yuen’s She Shoots Straight, a vehicle for Godenzi. Here, he brings his character, a Vietnamese general, to life through a collection of tics and gestures: hiccuping and giggling inappropriately; waving a handkerchief and fan to deal with the jungle heat. He is like a eunuch villain from a King Hu film transported to the present. The cocky young fighter played by Yuen Biao underestimates him and, in return, gets a devastating, lightning-fast kick to the chest.

As always, Hung tailors the choreography of the fights to his performers’ particular strengths, dressing Yuen Wah in a boxy suit that emphasizes the actor’s extraordinarily long limbs, and then shooting his punches and kicks from low angles to make him look even taller than he is, in contrast to the more compact Hung. The camera work is fluid, and the editing emphasizes the power and verisimilitude of the cast’s movements. A quick cut to an overhead shot showing Yuen Biao kicking his foot straight up into the air (and into Billy Chow’s face) is breathtaking, and Hung packs a half dozen moments like this into just a few minutes of action.

For all the dazzling demonstrations of physical strength showcased in Eastern Condors, the film ends on a surprisingly gloomy, ambiguous note. Unlike in Rambo: First Blood Part II, in which Stallone gets to return home after having at last won the war for America by killing a bunch of enemy soldiers, Eastern Condors leaves its heroes’ futures uncertain. The remaining members of the squad have avoided getting slaughtered, but we don’t see them return to the U.S. and receive the glory they’re due. Where Rambo got his chance for a victory speech, Hung’s men get no such triumphant climax: they are too tired for that. The last shot is from the vantage point of a distant helicopter, showing the heroes as specks amid the lush jungle greenery. Resolving the politics of war, and the historical tensions between East and West, is beyond the scope of Hung’s movie. We’re left only with memories of the awe-inspiring feats that he and his cast have performed for us—a conclusion that accentuates the world-weary mood that made Eastern Condors a remarkable breakthrough in Hung’s career and in action cinema at large.