Review – Red Dawn

Though I remember seeing this movie when it first hit theaters back in the roaring Reagan 80s, I don’t recall whether or not the notion of a full-scale Soviet invasion of the United States seemed more plausible back then than it does now. Somehow I suspect not. Even if the basic premise seemed sounder before the collapse of the USSR, the most paranoid red-baiter would still probably have trouble swallowing the notion that America’s first line of defense would prove to be a high school football team turned freedom fightin’ cadre. The teens (including early performances by budding luminaries such as Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen) organize themselves into a resistance unit that – without directly admitting having done so – closely follows the pattern established by “werwolf” terrorist groups formed by the Nazis at the end of World War Two to combat the Allied occupation. Over-wrought battle scenes are punctuated by long passages of ultra-masculine melodrama. The final product may stir a few survivalist hearts even today, but for the rest of us this is a mediocre historical relic and not much more. See if desperate