Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our man in Chicago, Capone. He's got the good (or not) word on STEALTH. I missed the Austin screening tonight, but from what Capone and my Austin friends who made it tonight have said... I may have dodged a bullet. Anyway, here's Capone. He doesn't go into great detail, so you don't need to watch for any major spoilers! Enjoy!
Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here, preparing myself to see the big Cannes winner BROKEN FLOWERS tonight with Jim Jarmusch in attendance. In the meantime, allow me to drop trou and dump this on you.
Loaded with high-speed, high-altitude jet chases and no-brain plot and dialogue, Stealth is the latest testosterone-laden offering from director Rob Cohen, one of the culprits who unleashed Vin Diesel into the world with The Fast and the Furious and XXX. Stealth will probably go down in history as nothing more than the first film co-star Jamie Foxx made after his Oscar win for Ray. The noteworthiness ends there.
I watched the film with a sense of pity for the poor actors who selected this project. It probably seemed like a safe bet when they signed on. A group of three elite Navy pilots (Foxx, Josh Lucas and Jessica Biel) have their mastery of the air challenged when a computer-controlled talking stealth fighter, nicknamed EDI (Eddie), is unveiled and flies beside the three in a combat mission. Since EDI is a learning machine, it picks up some of the pilots’ bad habits, such as disobeying orders. When a lightning strike fries EDI’s wiring, the plane goes haywire and decides to run a fictional war game sequence in the real world, which could result in the destruction of a major city in a hostile country.
If the filmmakers had simply stuck to that story, Stealth might have been a watchable. Instead, time-consuming and dreadfully dull subplots--involving an obvious romance between Lucas and Biel, Foxx’s womanizing ways, and the commanding officer’s (Sam Shepard, grossly stooping below his talents) desire to get the EDI project going whether the unit is fit for battle or not--all conspire to bog down what should have been a fairly cut-and-dry actioner. But when you first hear EDI talk in a voice clearly lifted from 2001’s H.A.L. computer, you know originality isn’t the film’s mission objective.
At about the halfway mark, the plane (and film) gets into trouble. It acts aggressively toward the three pilots, which results in several ridiculous plot twists. One pilot ends up behind enemy lines in North Korea, one bucks the system to save the stranded pilot, and one ends up dead. You can probably look at the order of the three stars’ names on the poster and tell who croaks, so I won’t ruin that. But what happens with EDI’s ever-increasing intelligence is just dead stupid. The tagline on the aforementioned poster is “Fear the Sky,” but it should read, “I think, therefore I possess bravado.”
The aerial sequences are exciting to a point. Clearly most of them are computer-generated, and therefore slightly fake looking. Sure, Stealth bombards us with impossible camera angles of the planes’ aerial acrobatics, but at least in Top Gun it looked real. And while none of the performances are god-awful, the script is so lifeless, that none of the leads are given a chance to rise above the poor writing. Oh, and a note to Ms. Biel: As long as you keep agreeing to wear a bikini, they are always going to make you wear one. I’m not complaining, but even your lovely curves ain’t saving this puppy. As with most Rob Cohen film, the idea is that all roads lead to speed, and Stealth is a prime example of that philosophy. Unfortunately, it is not a prime example of good filmmaking.
Capone
