09.27.06
lee1990 movie review: Flyboys
Plot: Super Sappy
Acting: Ultra hammy
Humor: None.
Effects: Outstanding.
My first thought after finishing with this movie was : I feel sticky. I thought that so much sap had oozed from the screen that I would need turpentine to extract myself from my seat. Just like Pearl Harbor, Hollywood has taken a perfectly good and potentially patriotic war epic and turning it into a 100 cliche pileup chick flick.
The acting is so flat and the characters so 2 dimensional (the villian is literally a black tri-wing German fighter with a falcon on the side) that I thought their images would fall off the screen from boredom. Remove the romantic slock and you would have a movie 1/2 as long and 2 times as good. It might have also left some room for small things like character development.
The one reason to see this movie on the big screen and not wait for DVD is the spectacular dogfighting scenes. The movie realistically captures the brutality of aerial combat when your plane is made of highly flammable canvas and wood, and you have no parachute. At one point in the movie, the instructor says to his eager young volunteers that if the plane catches fire, they can:
1. Ride it to the ground in a ball of flames.
2. Jump and fall several thousand feet.
3. Take the quick and painless way out. Whereupon, he hands each of them a pistol.
All together, for a movie about the Great War, this one was a Great Disappointment.
