Condor: Os Mercenários

At the beginning of the nineties, the heydays of Italian cult and exploitation cinema were long gone, but there were still a handful of directors who stubbornly yet bravely continued to unleash wannabe action blockbusters upon the video-market. Sergio Martino, for instance, teamed up again with beefcake Daniel Greene to make this passable but nevertheless very entertaining "After the Condor". Their previous collaboration "Vendetta Dal Futuro" was a Sci-Fi hodgepodge, but this is a fairly straightforward action/adventure set in Argentina. Greene plays a self-indulgent and overly confident newspaper photographer who likes to cause political scandals, but his publisher (Charles Napier) refuses to make the stories public. He's sent to Argentina, supposedly to take pictures of the rare condor, but in reality, he's looking for a lost treasure inside an airplane wreck that crashed into a glacier 40 years ago. The experienced and always-professional Sergio Martino stuffs his film with all sorts of delightful clichés: hidden clues in old houses, fist fights, executions, beautiful women that willing bare their breasts, airplane chases, car crashes, betrayal, animal cruelty, buddy action, mercenaries, and jokes in bad taste. The film goes entirely over the top when a native Indian, single-handedly and without diving equipment, manages to discover a lost plane that numerous fancy expeditions were unable to even locate. Everything about "After the Condor" is predictable and derivative, but also very, very entertaining.

PS: Review title inspired by the Simon & Garfunkel song "El Condor Pasa".