Red Dawn

There are just some things I will never understand.  Well, actually, I guess I do understand how people in the 80s thought Red Dawn was a cool movie.

It had Swayze, Howell, and Charlie Sheen back before Swayze was a ghost (for the first time), Sheen had a hooker problem, and Howell had no career.

It also stuck it to the Russians good and hard, a popular sentiment during the Reagan years.  But in today's world of Call of Duty and Band of Brothers a movie like this one would get laughed out of Hollywood.

Red Dawn might be the most unrealistic modern war movie ever.  The Russian soldiers make Vader's storm troopers look like Delta Force.  Seriously, the A-team fought more competent enemies.  Are you telling me they can't find a bunch of high school kids with absolutely no military training?  How the hell did they even get organized enough to invade in the first place?

The "heroes" are a bunch undisciplined, whiney, obnoxious, doofuses.  They just sort of hang out in the woods, with no light or noise discipline, and whenever they feel like it they go blow up a Russian base which all seem to be a comfortable walking distance away.

Don't the Russians have helicopters? Countless supplies at their disposal?  Trained soldiers?  Are the Russians even looking for them?  Oh actually, yes they are because they come up with that totally ridiculous plan of forcing the one guy to eat the tracking device so they can ambush them.  Why didn't that kid tell anyone that he had a tracking device in him anyway?

Is that John Candy on the end?

The only good thing I can say about this movie is that "Wolverines!" was a pretty clever name for that level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Some people apparently love this movie because they think it is "patriotic" or whatever.  I say to those people, remember that scene where the Russians are executing the prisoners and instead of dying with some dignity the prisoners decide to scream a horrendous rendition of "Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies"?  And they wonder why the communists hate us.

Red Dawn, you ain't Swayze, you're overrated.