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Flyboys
Genre: Action
Rated: PG-13
Directed by: Tony Bill
Starring: James Franco, Jean Reno, Philip Winchester, David
Ellison, Martin Henderson, Jennifer Decker
Released by: MGM
In
Short: This predictable tale of the real-life
Americans who flew for the French in World War
I has exciting dogfights, but is shot down by
its hackneyed script. |
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Failure to Soar
War,
Simplified
by
Jenny Peters
The
true tale of the American men who volunteered to fight
for France as fighter pilots against the Germans in World
War I (before America actually entered the fight) certainly
must be filled with all the elements that could have made
a great movie. Unfortunately, “Flyboys” doesn’t
tell that story. Instead, director Tony Bill pulls out
every possible tired cliché of the war-film genre,
right down to the golden boy hero (played by James Franco)
who finds romance in the midst of the fray, the proud
black man fighting for respect, the tormented veteran
flying ace, and the shell-shocked coward who (surprise!)
redeems himself with bravery in the final moments.
Even
worse, Bill takes more than two hours to unfold the platoon
of stock characters, a group of mostly misfits who have
chosen the Lafayette Escadrille air corps as a place to
escape their unhappy lives back home. There’s the
rich boy whose daddy doesn’t understand him, the
bumbling thief on the run from the law; you fill in the
rest of the rote roll call. It’s Screenwriting 101
on celluloid, with every cliché played out as predictably
as the sun shining in Southern California.
Feelings
of "I’ve seen this all before" will dissipate,
however, when the dogfights finally begin. At
least when the pilots take to the skies, the movie takes
off. Stunning special effects make those various battle
scenes seem very real, as the one-man, open-cockpit planes
zip, flip, and hammer each other with hails of bullets.
One sequence involving a zeppelin is particularly effective,
despite its cornball climax between our hero and his German
rival.
But
good battle scenes do not a great war film make; real
themes and complex characters facing life-or-death situations
do, and “Flyboys” is woefully lacking in either
of those. For the real thing, try renting Stanley Kubrick’s
“Paths of Glory.” Now that is a cinematic
look at World War I that you will never forget.
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