Cast: Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Haing S. Ngor, Joyce Godenzi, Chui Man-yan, Ha Chi-chun, Lam Ching-ying, Melvin Wong, Charlie Chin, Cheung Kwok-keung, Billy Lau, Yuen Woo-ping, Corey Yuen, Peter Chan, Chin Kar-lok, Hsiao Ho, Lau Chau-sang, Yuen Wah. Screenplay: Barry Wong. Cinematography: Arthur Wong. Production design: King Man Lee. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Danny Chung.
Blithely stealing from classics in the genre, Sammo Hung crafts in Eastern Condors the action film to end all action films. (If only.) The premise is that after the fall of Saigon, the retreating Americans left behind a missile installation that they now want to disarm, lest it fall into the wrong hands. So the American military recruits undocumented Chinese immigrants now in prison for a variety of offenses to be air-dropped into Vietnam to destroy the facility. If they succeed, they will be rewarded with American citizenship and a large sum of money. If this sounds familiar, at least there are more than a dozen of them and they're not particularly dirty. Eastern Condors is full of gags ribbing the Americans, as well as a few that wouldn't pass muster in an American movie, such as a volunteer whose stutter is played for laughs until it proves fatal. There's more gunplay than kung fu in Hung's movie, although it ends with a great martial arts standoff that's worth sitting through the rest of the movie for. Hung, slimmed down for the film, plays a more serious role than usual, but the movie is stolen by Yuen Biao as the wily Rat Chien and Yuen Wah as a giggling Viet Cong general modeled on some of James Bond's more epicene villains.
