So it’s been 3.5 months since Jess and I watched an AFI movie together, and that’s because this was the next movie on our list. It’s a Vietnam War movie from 1978 with Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro, and every word of that sentence makes me dread the experience of watching it more than the previous. (You may recall that Platoon is the only of the AFI movies I’ve been watching so far that I didn’t finish, partly because it fell off of Hulu while I was “taking a break” in the middle of it, but also partly because I was stabbing my eyeballs to make myself watch even as far as I did.)

So when I say that this movie was better than I expected, you have to understand that I’m starting from a very, very low baseline of expectations. But still and all: This movie was better than I expected.

Mostly that’s because it’s not entirely a war movie. The entire first hour (of three!) takes place in a Russian-American community in Pennsylvania, and is about the wedding of a guy who works at a steel… foundry? factory? mill? Well, whatever it is they do to steel, they’re doing it there in molten rivulets that seem super-unpleasant, as does the entire grimy-ass, rundown, soot-covered town full of hideous ’70s cars.

Okay, that’s not really selling it, but what’s cool about this section is the wedding itself, which takes up like no shit forty minutes of screen time. Because it’s this incredibly ethnic celebration, like there’s this Russian Orthodox ceremony in a big fancy church, and then they have a reception where everyone’s singing the same Russian-language folk songs and doing traditional dances and stuff, and I feel like this is a world that’s kind of vanishing: In this movie, at this time, even the young people could go along with all that, but in 2021, I feel like the modern-day descendants of these people would mostly have a kind of vague attachment to these traditions and would remember those songs and dances that their parents do, but it wouldn’t be as deeply ingrained for them, and if they could sing a Russian song or two, they’d have no idea what the words meant. So it’s this real snapshot of the life of a community tied to this specific time and place, and that’s pretty cool.

But if that’s sounding too interesting, I should probably mention that every single one of the people in this movie is terrible, with multiple instances of domestic violence, homophobia, and just general shitheadery all-around. Anyway, it’s about to not matter, because did I mention that three of the guys from this town are shipping out to war the very next day? CRASH CUT TO NAM.

Massive spoilers for the entire movie follow.

So the thing about the Vietnam War part of this is that it’s not the boring standard movie that I expected, either. I was entirely thinking it’d be one of those Apocalypse Now/Platoon-style things where people start off all idealistic and whatever, and then are forced to commit atrocities and blah blah descent into darkness. But no. We basically cut to the war already in progress, and our boys are captured by a group of Viet-Cong that makes their prisoners play Russian Roulette against themselves. This is allegedly a tense and powerful scene of horror, but… y’know, not really. It’s a little silly, and comes off as exactly the kind of overthought, implausible plot device that it is.

Blah blah daring escape (turns out that giving prisoners a loaded gun isn’t only dangerous for the prisoners), our boys get separated, and now we go to Saigon, where we see Christopher Walken have his first encounter watching a professional Russian Roulette tournament, and you might be like: That’s probably not a thing? And indeed it probably is not. But anyway, he joins in, gets paid some money, and then runs off with the head promoter guy while Robert De Niro, who saw him in the crowd, tries to chase him.

So that’s the second hour of the movie. Now for the third hour, the war is basically over, and we see Robert De Niro back in Pennsylvania, and here’s the most textbook War Movie part of the thing, where all his friends keep greeting him as a war hero and he’s uncomfortable and doesn’t want to talk about it and all that by-now-familiar genre furniture. To be fair, I think in 1978 that was considerably more novel. The movie is cagey about the fates of the other guys, but eventually we find out that one of them (the guy who got married in the first act) is now in a VA hospital with only one working limb, and doesn’t want to leave, and then he tells De Niro that oh btw, Christopher Walken is still in Vietnam, and he keeps sending him lots of money.

De Niro of course jumps to the obvious conclusion that anyone would jump to, which is that Walken has gone pro on the Russian Roulette tournament scene, and, uh, has spent most of a year or so playing every night and winning piles of money without losing, which let’s not run the odds on that.

Somehow, De Niro now flies into a war zone in Vietnam while Americans are evacuating before the fall of Saigon, which let’s also not ask too many questions about how the hell that happened, and tracks down Walken in a seedy Russian roulette tournament house. (Seriously, there is no way this is a thing.)

Walken’s just about to play a game, and De Niro tries to stop him, but Walken won’t be stopped. De Niro, propelled by desperate screenwriter logic, buys in to the game so he can play against Walken. Walken picks up the gun, with De Niro begging him not to shoot, hey buddy remember your girl back home, remember the bar, etc. Walken shoots… click. Now to De Niro, who is like, hey man, I love you, I’m not going to leave you here, do you really want me to do this? Come on, let’s just quit this and go home, but Walken isn’t blinking, and so De Niro, still motivated by whatever the fuck movie plot logic is happening here, shoots. Click.

And now Walken blinks. De Niro’s gotten through to him. He’s almost ready to go home, but he’s not quite there yet. “One more shot,” he tells De Niro, picks up the gun, shoots, and… obviously he shoots himself and dies, because yes, this is that kind of movie. I literally broke out laughing, and kept laughing during the entire scene when De Niro is cradling his body like “OH GOD NO HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN WHAT HORRIBLE IRONY WOE WOE” because jesus fuck, screenwriters, you can only go so far with your absurd ridiculous bullshit before it becomes literally impossible to take it seriously, and you went waaaaaay past that line.

So anyway, De Niro brings his body back home, they have a funeral, and the gang all gets together awkwardly for breakfast in a bar afterward. They sing “God Bless America,” raise their beers for a toast, freeze frame, credits.

And at this point, you’re probably saying, okay, um, this sounds like a bad movie? And yes, it’s a bad movie. But as discussed above, it’s not as bad as I expected, and it had some interesting stuff along the way, so by the standard of Vietnam War movies, this is an absolute triumph. I can’t really recommend it, but if you asked me to rewatch a Vietnam War movie right now, out of the ones I’ve seen, this would be my choice by a mile.