FATAL MISSION. 1990; aka Enemy. Peter Fonda, Tia Carrere, Mako, James Mitchum, Ted Markland. Co-screenwriter: Peter Fonda (*). Director: George Rowe.

Peter Fonda Fatal Mission

   Ninety percent of this movie reminded me of a book in a poor man’s Edward S. Aarons “Assignment” series. Peter Fonda, as the CIA agent who assassinates a North Vietnamese general and tries to get away with it, with a little more prompting might make a fairly decent Sam Durell, but in the end he’s undone by the ending itself.

   I’ll get to that in a minute, but let me mention a couple of other things first. (1) Tia Ferrare may be an exotic-looking beauty, but to my eye she really doesn’t look Chinese, and that’s what she’s supposed to be in this movie, as the ChiCom who first chases Fonda to ground, then becomes his prisoner and finally his guide to freedom.

   As for (2), what do you suppose happens to Fonda’s first guide, a man who tells him “Once I get you back in one piece, I get ticket to USA…” ? (If this were a quiz, I can’t imagine anybody getting this one wrong.)

   The scenery is very nice, and the small little plot twist is acceptably nasty, but the ending is not so much downbeat as it is flat. Downbeat (I grant you) is par for the course in spy stories, as well as for Vietnam movies in general, but this ending is so meaningless as to make the movie that preceded it barely worth watching.

   I imagine you could make the point that the ending has as much meaning as the war itself. That could be, but I’d be hard pressed to say that there’s any reason for watching this movie a second time. (On the other hand, I’d have to agree with the basic premise that’s at work here: there isn’t any reason for redoing that foolish war either.)

      ____

    (*) Along with four other people, if you can imagine that. Each one must have been in charge of twelve lines of dialogue. This is an Action Picture.

— Reprinted from Mystery*File 33, Sept 1991 (slightly revised).



Peter Fonda Fatal Mission[UPDATE] 01-14-09.   I remember nothing about this movie at all — nothing more than the review above, which I assume I wrote soon after I watched it. The revisions I did were only to improve the sentence structure now and there.

   I can’t even speak to what I felt was a major point of the film, but if the basic premise is what I seem to have suggested it is, then I certainly wish somebody had been listening (and learning) when it was important to listen.

[LATER]  I’ve just watched a trailer for the movie on YouTube. I still don’t remember the movie, and the trailer instills in me no great desire to rummage around for my copy of it on VHS.