Following the success of Operation: Mekong from 2016, action director Dante Lam brings us another power military action movie with Operation Red Sea. Arriving on Blu-ray, Digital, and DVD next week from Well Go USA, Operation Red Sea is easily one of the most intense military action films I have seen in a long time.
The story sees eight members of the Chinese Navy’s elite special ops team, Jiaolong (Sea Dragon), caught behind lines in a fictional middle eastern country. What began as an almost suspiciously straight-forward extraction mission turns into a massively out-numbered fight for their lives and a battle stop the distribution of nuclear arms-making materials. Due to unrest in this middle eastern country, the Jiaolong are sent in to extract Chinese citizens. Mostly successful, things gets worse when ‘yellowcake,’ an innocent sounding-term for nuclear weapon materials, is being handled and distributed.
Operation Red Sea is smartly paced and engaging throughout. The entire crew was new to me, as I haven’t seen any of Dante Lam’s movies before, or any of the actors, but I had no complaints in their performance. My only complaint is some of the gore is just brutal; I understand it’s realistic for warfare and explosions, but it’s pretty hard to watch three or four scenes in particular in which bodies are just destroyed. Personally, I could have done with just the insinuation of this gore instead of the visual depiction of it, as having it displayed reduces my interest in re-watching this film. Other than that, Operation Red Sea is a thrilling military action movie displaying kickass tactics, weapons, and the “good guys” stomping out and defeating the bad. The film runs well over two hours but never hits a lull for any significant length of time.
On Blu-ray, the movie looks fantastic as you would expect from a modern, high budget, high production quality film. Scenes are typically bright and very well lit, from sea-based action at the start to the dusty brown desert combat as well as inner city battles between the terrorist army and the Jianlong. I found no fault with the quality of the video. Similarly the sound was excellent. There is no English dub track, which is perfectly fine for me, but Dolby X support sounded quite good on my Yamaha YAS-207 soundbar.
There are a few extra features included, such as the trailer and eight deleted scenes. The deleted scenes add roughly twenty minutes of extra content. Having watched these eight, it’s apparent why they were removed from the film. It’s not because the scenes were poorly shot, but they just didn’t fit the pacing and added content that just wasn’t necessary to the enjoyment and quality of the movie. Bottomline, if you enjoy military action movies and can bear some scenes of intense violence, Operation Red Sea is easy to recommend. It’s a big budget, high quality film that is engaging throughout and the Blu-ray release offers excellent quality and some decent extras.
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