Stealth

• Title: Stealth
• IMDB: link

Ever wonder what would happen if you took half the script for Iron Eagle 2 and half the script for Short Circuit and removed anything remotely good, or funny, or interesting?  I didn’t either, but obviously the makers of this film needed to solve this philosophical dilemma.

Stealth is the worst type of summer movie: a summer action adventure film that breaks all the rules of reality and the world in which it takes place indiscriminately.  The movie steals plot, story, scenes, and characters from everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to War Games to Firefox, and yet can’t seem to capture any single moment of believability, fun, or excitement.

Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, and Josh Lucas play Navy pilots who have been specially trained to fly a new jet fighter.  The commander of this project (Sam Shepard) shows up to introduce them to their new team member.  EDI (who will be referred to as Johnny Number Five for the rest of this review)  is a new jet that is controlled completely by a state of the art computer intelligence.  The crew is uneasy about letting a computer into the squad, and even more so after Johnny Number Five is hit by lightning and starts to think for himself.

Where, oh where, to begin.  Let’s start with the title.  The jets, which although visually interesting, do not resemble stealth bombers in any way.  You might think this is odd.  I certainly did, because not only are these jets not stealths, but they aren’t even used in situations where you would use a stealth bomber.  So why was it named Stealth?  Maybe they realized no one would go see Short Circuit 3: Johnny Gets High.

There are many shots of the jets flying, so many in fact you will get bored of this really, really quickly.  No expense has been saved on locations for the other scenes.  The inside of the aircraft carrier looks like it was filmed in a warehouse in West Hollywood, and later scenes involve one of the characters running through what appears to be the Hollywood hills.  Nice job guys.

As far as acting goes, Richard Roxburgh comes off best here as the Steve Guttenbegish creator, for no other reason than he gets less time on camera than anyone else.  Usually in a movie this bad you can take some comfort in the sexual exploitation of the leading female character.  No luck here.  Aside from a short shore leave scene in a bathing suit, Biel spends most of the movie stuffed in a cockpit and bulky uniform.  As for shore leave, if I knew Naval officers got this much time off, and didn’t have to follow any orders they don’t want to, I would have joined up years ago.  This movie makes Top Gun look like a naval documentary.

If you see every movie of the summer except one, make it this one.  I’d rather have watched Fantastic Four again than watch this stupid, silly, and very predictable movie.  Aside from all the problems listed above the movie primarily fails as a summer action movie since it turns out to be pretty boring.  All the plot points have been stolen from other movies, which did them better, and the basic action sequences aren’t that interesting.  The explosions don’t feel big, the death toll keeps rising but the movie gives us no reason to care.  If you want to get the mild malaise this film with give you just hit your head on your car door about seven times and then twirl in a circle until you fall down.  If you think that’s worth $10, then go see this movie, but I don’t advise it when you can have the same experience in your driveway for free.