Red Dawn

Made in the last years of the Evil Empire, I noticed Red Dawn on a movie channel and wanted to see how well it held up 22 years later. The story is basic Cold War stuff, turned on its head. The Soviets, with a force lead by their Cuban and Nicaraguan allies, invade but all we really see is what happens in one small piece, a small town in the Nebraska plains. Few nukes, it turns out, were needed to take America down.

As an airborne unit lands one September day, a few kids break loose and head into the mountains; fortunately two of them, brothers played by Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, had a dad (the laconic Harry Dean Stanton) who taught them to hunt and camp, to be real redblooded American men.

Swayze keeps them hidden and safe for the first month but then they head into town to find out what’s happening. The boys find Stanton and a few dozen other potential troublemakers hearded into a re-education camp and themselves atop the most wanted list. Time to do something!

The boys start small, picking off occupying soldiers when they travel in small numbers outside town. After picking up two granddaughters of a family friend (Leah Thomspon and a barely recognizable Jennifer Grey), they get busy with the help of weaponry taken off the dead. It goes on from there.

This is a couple of years, by the way, before Grey teamed up with Swayze in Dirty Dancing or Sheen in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. While she was the love interest of both in those movies, and despite the difficult, isolated lifestyle they endure together, nobody hooks up here.

Directed by Apocalypse Now scribe and all-around tough guy John Milius and co-written by Milius and Kevin Reynolds, Red Dawn is the nightmare side of our struggle with the Communist bloc. The complacency and arrogance of our political leaders is what could lead to this result.

But Milius is guilty of some serious laziness himself, or perhaps the blame belongs to the budding Brat Pack cast (C. Thomas Howell is in the gang too, and of course gets to do his anguished shtick), but someone needs to tell me how these kids’ hair is always clean and neatly trimmed, their clothes reasonably fresh rather than in tatters and how the boys don’t have at least scraggly beards. My hair would be a greasy, tangled–and long–mess after months in the hills!

modestly recommended