Firehawk Reviews

This cliched Vietnam war picture, released direct-to-video, tells the tale of hardbitten loose cannon Stewart (Martin Kove), who flies a helicopter for a MediVac unit. Stewart's crew consists of conscientious black medic David (Terrence T.C. Carson), tough Tex (Matt Salinger), dopefiend joker Bates (Vic Trevino), South Vietnamese guide Li (Ronald Asinas), and co-pilot Jimmy (James Paolleli), who, injured on one near-disastrous mission, is replaced by the inexperienced Hobbs (Jeff Yonis). Returning to base camp, after hearing over the radio that a plane carrying the highly classified Firehawk device has crashed, their own helicopter goes down because of a sabotaged fuel line that the men blame on Li. They start hiking towards the distant base, and when Li discovers that they're going in the wrong direction, Stewart executes him for sabotaging the helicopter. As they skirmish with the Viet Cong, Stewart makes an ally of the gung-ho Tex, while Davis, Bates, and Hobbs come to suspect that Stewart has gone berserk. Back at the base, Jimmy recovers, and flies out alone to find his unit. He sights them mid-battle; Stewart, who's been heading for the downed Firehawk plane all along, kills Bates and drives Jimmy off. Stewart ties up David and Hobbs, and all four are captured and tortured by the VC. Jimmy forces his commanding officer to explain that the Firehawk project consists of a dummy nuclear warhead trickily wired around conventional explosives that, the plan goes, the VC will take to their munitions center and attempt to arm but set off instead, destroying their weapons. Jimmy flies off again to rescue the men. Stewart promises technical help to the VC with the Firehawk device in exchange for the lives of his men, who are freed. Grabbing their captors' guns, they decimate the outpost. Stewart triggers Firehawk and is blown up along with the VC officers and the munitions dump. Davis, Tex, and Hobbs are rescued by Jimmy. Written by actor Jeff Yonis (who plays Hobbs), FIREHAWK is genuinely, and interestingly, divided: part post-Vietnam war-is-hell statement and part gung-ho war-action antics featuring a patriotic--if ultimately psychopathic--American hero. While decently written, Yonis' story line is confusing on one crucial point: as explained by Stillwell, the entire Firehawk project is self-contained and relies on Viet Cong incompetence to work. Yet Stewart is gamely willing to kill his own men and evade rescue to get to the device and ensure its activation. Whether Stewart is acting on his own or as part of the larger plan remains unclear. However, such analysis is definitely beyond this picture, which is mostly a Vietnam-updated knock-off of the classic WWII war movie about a unit stranded behind enemy lines working its way to safety. The three central performances, by Salinger, Carson, and top-billed Kove, are strong, if unexceptional. The direction by Cirio H. Santiago--who is based in the Philippines, where this film was shot, and has ground out more than a dozen low-budget exploitation war and thriller movies for Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures over the last few years--is strictly routine, and the action scenes, in which the Americans (who are never short of ammunition) mow down hordes of enemy soldiers, repetitive. A curious aspect of the Vietnam war-movie genre, harking back to the overtly racist actioners made by Hollywood as WWII propaganda, is the gross (and grossly unhistorical) incompetence of enemy soldiers. Might the resultant scenes of mass Asian death be a right-wing fantasy payback for losing the real war? (Violence, extreme profanity.)