The Odd Angry Shot Reviews

An Australian film about that country's involvement in the Vietnam war, THE ODD ANGRY SHOT centers on a group of Aussie volunteers in the Special Air Service, an elite fighting unit. These men view the war as if they were competitive athletes looking forward to a sporting contest, until things become violent and bloody. Director Tom Jeffrey goes to great pains to convey a detailed sense of the sights and sounds of the fighting, both on the front lines and behind them. He is aided by the evocative lensing of Don McAlpine, who worked as a cameraman in Vietnam during the war, and by the US Department of Defense, which provided the necessary military hardware. But Jeffrey's real emphasis is on the way his soldiers react to the chaos that surrounds them, and he manages to wrench comedy from their attempts to survive in one piece. Graham Kennedy, in particular, is persuasive as a career soldier who becomes disillusioned with the army life he had embraced to escape the pressures of civilian existence.