Red Dawn

RED DAWN (15)

D: John Milius

MGM/United Artists/Valkyrie (Buzz Feitshans & Sidney Beckerman)

US 1984

114 mins

Action/War

W: Kevin Reynolds & John Milius

DP: Ric Waite

Ed: Thom Noble

Mus: Basil Poledouris

Patrick Swayze (Jed), Charlie Sheen (Matt), C. Thomas Howell (Robert), Lea Thompson (Erica), Jennifer Grey (Toni), Darren Dalton (Daryl)

Like many films from the 1980's, Red Dawn has dated incredibly poorly, and even for 1984 it's ridiculously far-fetched to the point of incredulity.

The film wastes no time chucking us into the thick of the action, as an army of Russians & Cuban soldiers storm a small Colorado town, prompting a group of high school students to flee into the woods, where they regroup and become a guerrilla fighting unit, adopting the name "Wolverines" after their school mascot.

Released when US-Soviet relations were still on the brink of Cold War, this film was never anything more than flag-waving propaganda aimed at an adolescent audience. Retrospectively, the scale of peril isn't particularly convincing because it's just centralised to a small, nowhere town in Hicksville.

The performances really aren't great either, although it could be argued that the young cast did the best they could with the chickenshit dialogue that the screenplay presented them with.

4/10