Search - Soldier's Revenge on DVD

Fatuous In All Respects.

rsoonsa | Lake Isabella, California | 06/14/2005

(1 out of 5 stars)

"For this poorly produced and distributed work, the video box text states that the film's protagonist returned to Denton, Texas, following his Special Operations tour of duty in Viet Nam, a Denton of "honkey tonks, dirt roads and rednecks", but as the actual Denton is rather much nicer than that, a bedroom community north of Dallas, the location is sagely changed to a non-existent one: "Freemont", (shot in the Los Angeles area) for which it is safe to describe in harsher terms. U.S. Army helicopter pilot Frank Morgan (John Savage) goes to Freemont a day too late to attend the funeral of his mother, and this tardiness, atop an article he pens for a magazine that serves to expose a slaughter of Vietnamese civilians, in which he played an unknowing role, leaves him open to ill treatment by his former town acquaintances who strongly urge him to leave and not come back. After singlehandedly thrashing a pool hall contingent of antagonists, Frank is pursued by the thrashees, in addition to the hostile local sheriff, to a nearby airport where an attractive Hispanic woman, Beatriz (Maria Socas) is stranded, having a plane but no pilot, the craft laden with weapons that Beatriz intends to utilize as exchange for her kidnapped father's release, with the ordnance to be employed by the revolutionaries who hold her sire hostage; naturally, along comes fleeing flyer Frank who agrees to transport her and the munitions to her native land, "San Florian". The storyline is disjointed and very little of the action will make any sense to a viewer despite a heavy-handed message difficult to avoid, i.e., war is an unnecessary hell, an ironic stance when taken with the work's constant emphasis upon (poorly performed) violence, particularly gun battles and explosions. If there was any original merit of any sort to this mess, it was erased during post-production work, resulting in a sloppily edited and filmed affair, often too visually dark to be seen at all, with subpar dubbing, looping and synching of the sound track, all merely adding to the confusion occasioned by an unsoundly composed screenplay."