Stealth

Starring: Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx
Director: Rob Cohen


How many times have we heard this one?
Lightning / power surge / coffee makes already scarily intelligent, quasi-sentient machine….ALIVE!

Stealth ain’t the first, it won’t be the last, and if they all make ‘em like this I say more power to them. This was way fun.

Rob Cohen pulls out all his training on The Fast And The Furious and takes it to 35,000 feet. When it works, don’t fuck with the formula:

Originality is overrated. This is 2001: Space Odyssey with stealth bombers. HAL is now EDI (pronounced Eddy for Extreme…something something). EDI is a UCAV ( Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle). He speaks, he flies like a pro, he downloads illegal MP3s and he kills his fellow wingmen. Lucas, Biel and a pre-Oscar Foxx are the 3 ace pilots in the Talon program – hypersonic jet fighters (they go up to Mach 5 or something) to be used on the WAR AGAINST TERROR WHICH WE STILL HAVEN’T WON. Naturally, it all goes to hell in a hand basket when EDI gets zapped, decides taking orders is for losers, and goes on a heat-seeking missile murder spree. Sound familiar? He even sounds like HAL. “Good morning, (insert polite but murderous comment here)”

Blow lotsa shit up. Rob Cohen recycles – and this is a good thing – his moves from The Fast And The Furious. A pilot fires a missile and we get a tour of the whole launch mechanism before the rocket lets loose. And really, hats off to the guys at Digital Domain – the aircraft effects are very real. Some very nifty camera work too. It really does feel like a rollercoaster: you fly across the ocean, in between fighters, up the rear thrusters with the jet wash shaking and frying the lens, then you zoom into the cockpit to hear the pilot spout some macho bullshit. And the explosions. Whoa. Dude. Two stick in my mind – a ring of fire at 30,000 ft and a multi-truck detonation that actually as people getting caught in every loving slo-mo second.

Show Jessica Biel. A lot. Like in the waterfall in a bikini. Like crawling around in the mud wearing her low-rise, hipster flight suit (what the?). I believe you can totally save a crap show with Jessica Biel. Hell, Jessica Biel might’ve saved King Arthur. Or The Punisher. Anybody who saw Blade Trinity will agree.

This was really good. Characters are cardboard, lines are cheesy, politics are all over the place (Sam Shepard sniggers “North Korea? We have no diplomatic ties with that country”). And because of all this, it is pitch perfect. EDI’s exit was a bit of a letdown, but every other criticism you have will need to be thought about and recalled. And in the end, you won’t mind one bit. Nu-uh.