7/10
Not too shabby
6 October 2002
Warning: Spoilers
You gotta love a movie that's set during the last days of the Vietnam war yet the clubs and radios play 80's music. I know, nobody watches these films for realism, they watch them for...what DO they watch them for again?

Well, this was made after two other Margheriti war films, The Last Hunter(1980) and Tiger Joe(1982). Tornado is the weakest of the three, but not by as much as I expected it would be. Timothy Brent/Giancarlo Prete is a pretty decent lead.

You want to know about the story? Some lunatic army commander regularly makes decisions that lead to the injury/death/abandonment of his men yet nobody really gets on his case about it until a hotshot superstar green beret has had enough and punches him in the nose. Then the hotshot is arrested by the MP, but the vietcong attack and the vehicle he's in is damaged and he manages to escape. From there on, it's a battle of wills between the hotshot who hates the commander and the commander who feels that if the hotshot does escape, it would reflect well on the commander, because he trained the hotshot, but the commander wants him dead anyway. Even though the war has been officially declared over.

It's good to see Luciano Pigozzi (aka Allan Collins) pop up here (it seems like he's in all of these) but his role is fairly boring.

The ending sort of came out of nowhere. I read an interview with Margheriti and he claimed that the ambiguity of who did what to a certain someone in the final shot (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) was intentional. Well it made me laugh, and I don't think that was intentional.
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