Runtime: 89 minutes
Directed by: Mikhali Tumanishvili
Starring: Mikhail Nozhkin, Aleksandr Fatyushin, Arnis Licitis, Nartay Begalin, Sergey Nasibov
From: Mosfilm
What a movie I watched on Thanksgiving night. I explain this surreal Soviet sensation below:
Here is a bizarre oddity I randomly stumbled on two nights ago; once again it was on Amazon Video and personally I much rather prefer their service to something like Netflix Instant because Instant has a lot of new crap I don't really care about, while Amazon's offering has a much wider selection, and are surfeit in niche titles. Sure, it also has a bevy of new crap I don't really care about, but I can easily ignore that and instead focus on movies that even I haven't heard of before, and as I am a Prime member, plenty of it is for free. That includes random films from the Soviet Union... even if they are under different titles. In this case, you can find this under the nonsense title Solo Voyage: The Revenge.
This film is especially weird... imagine the Russkies doing a version of Rambo: First Blood Part II, except they found a way to make Rambo and its ideas blasphemy. That's what this is. The studios behind the Iron Curtain really did not do any of the 80's action movies Hollywood and plenty of foreign countries did... really, most of the ones filmed in those Communist countries were done by Hollywood studios. Until Communism fell in those countries, the action typically was in war movies. But this is a rare exception; Mosfilm was responsible for it and some have used the label “Soviet Rambo”! That nickname is a misnomer; there are no sweaty oiled-up muscular man running around, kicking a lot of ass. A Lone Wolf hero seems like the antithesis of the ideals that the proletariat are supposed to follow, anyhow.
This movie of course has the Americans as the evil villains-something a lot of people in foreign countries have no trouble believing-and the United States decides to stir up trouble with the Soviets for the sake of profit. This is decided while some “important people” are playing a game of golf. I hate to say they captured the essence of the United States, but... a dude who looks like a unholy cross between Walton Goggins and Michael Ironside is the main American we follow, and it's quite the twist; he is a loose cannon character who is a Vietnam vet and because he was damaged by being in 'Nam-and he doesn't like people from Far East Asia either-he goes crazy and instead of only doing something minor to escalate tensions, he has two nuclear warheads and World War III could begin. Between what I've described already and American military ships & stations having empty Coke and Heineken cans all over the place... what Communist propaganda this is.
Before you can say “perestroika”, the Soviet heroes all work together and for example are willing to help a Yankee couple who were accidentally had their sailboat hit with a missile by their own military... and yeah, those Yankees act all paranoid so there's another negative trait presented. Admittedly, the first hour hardly has any action and even the final act is not action-packed so this doesn't compare to something like Rambo: First Blood Part II or Commando. But I was never bored and it being so unusual helped; heck, this Russian movie has Russian actors and yet much of it was shot in English. It don't matter if they were playing Russian or American, most of them spoke English. Between that, the look of the film, and how at least part of this takes place on a tropical island (in this case, the final act), it's awfully easy to compare this to something done by the Filipinos-Cirio H. Santiago is an example-or by the Italians, such as Bruno Mattei. Yep, that low budget. Remember, a major Soviet studio made and released the picture, and allegedly was quite popular in the USSR.
After the Iron Curtain fell, there were of course more movies of this type to come out; I did not discover it until after Vinegar Syndrome had all their copies sell, but one day I'd love to see 1993's Red Mob as from what clips I've seen, there's an 80's action movie not actually from the decade. This movie is not great but partially due to the novelty factor, I can say this is acceptable-enough. The comrades seemed like decent lads. Presumably this did not quench the thirst of those in the Eastern Bloc who saw those great 80's action films via some brave souls smuggling those in; it's a true story I've heard from several wildly different sources.
Between that and the people of Wakaliwood in Uganda making their own films because they love those motion pictures too... they may not be the greatest of human beings in real life but glasnost, Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies and those of similar style are pretty tremendous, aren't they?
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