The Red Eagle – Review

In the year 2016, the streets of Bangkok are run greedy businessmen, corrupt government officials, and drug dealers. The city’s only hope rest in the hands of masked vigilante known as Red Eagle. Red Eagle is being tortured by his own personal demons as he fights crime and avoids the Bangkok police who are desperately trying to find out his identity. His task becomes even tougher when the crime organization Matulee hires a ruthless assassin known as Black Devil to kill him. Similar to the Green Hornet, except this film actually has a decent villian, which helps out the story immensly. The film is based on the 1960s action franchise that starred the legendary Mitr Chaibancha, which was originally based on a series of crime novels by writer Sake Dusit. Again, similar to Green Hornet.

The movie starts out with a group of men dealing drugs only to be stopped. . He gruesomely kills the leader and leaves leaving his name card behind. This sets the tone quite well. Red Eagle is another step in the vigilante genre which seems to be growing every year. However there are a bunch of negative marks that stopped this film from achieving greatness. For one, The Red Eagle is a slow paced film. Stretching longer then two hours, it has some 15-20 minutes of solid fight scenes, but between them, everything else moves at a molasses pace. Storyline can become incoherent, and so is directing style and editing. Maybe it’s because I expected something nearly as good as Ong Bak. But there are simply too many flaws to forgive. Red Eagle is far, far from the afore mentioned best action movie that came out from Thailand.

The movie is full of coincidental connections, cheesy dialogue, and overacting bad guys. There isn’t a shred of Thai character, not even any humor. Also, since everyone wears masks, ALL the time, its hard to connect with any of the characters. That’s the kind of movie we’re talking about here, where the story and characters are secondary concerns. What I probably liked the best out of everything though was  tha the final scene pays tribute to actor Mitr Chaibancha, who played Red Eagle back in the 1960s and who died in a stunt accident on the last day of shooting Golden Eagle.

All in all, if you’re looking for another vigilante film I would recommend Zebraman 2 over this any day of the week. There just isn’t enough here to keep you watching. There are motorcycle chases, hand-to-hand combat, sword fights, shootouts, and explosions, so if I say it’s not worth watching, you know it must be bad. Instead of dusting off old franchises for a new millennium and given a special-effects friendly new look for modern audiences, studios should concentrate on making good movies in general. It made its North American premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival, and I could easily see a distributor picking this film up so you may not have to wait long to see this film at your local cinema.