FIRE BIRDS
A film review by Robert Dorsett
Copyright 1990 Robert Dorsett
The previews of FIRE BIRDS make it out to be another TOP GUN: when I first saw them, my reaction was "is that legal?" The plots seemed to be almost identical. Well, I was wrong: the plots are slightly different, and TOP GUN is the better movie. I kid you not.
FIRE BIRDS is a confused (or, in the words of one patron in the audience, "stupid") movie that pitches AH-64 Apaches against the Villain of the Week, the "drug cartel." Its central characters are two rather egocentric, immature men, one a pilot (played by Nicholas Cage), the other his instructor (played by Tommy Lee Jones). No, kids, Sean Young doesn't play a terribly noteworthy role, except, perhaps, to give women someone to identify with (I am starting to understand the bean counters in Hollywood, and strongly suspect this to be the case). All three pilots are Good. Damned Good. The Best. You know the type. :-)
The story (let's see if I got this right) has a group of Apache pilots being trained to provide air support for a Gesta--uh, DEA, raid against some kind of summit conference of Drug Lords. Cage plays the young bronco, Young the love interest. Besides personality problems, Cage has a problem flying with a night vision gizmo (which turns out to be utterly irrelevant), and develops a competition of wits with his instructor, who has just turned 40.
The two bright spots in the movie are the character of Jones, as well as his performance; and the nice photography. Unlike TOP GUN, the dogfights in this movie can actually be followed. If one ignores the absurdity of pushing the old Apache (or any helicopter) as a fighter (the movie got extensive support from the Army and McDonnell Douglas, so its PR aspect is undoubtedly well considered), most of the combat sequences are pretty fun.
Problem is, though, one has to wade through some of the stupidest, corniest dialog of all time, in order to get to the good parts. For this reason, I give this movie a 6/10 rating.
In terms of letter grades, here's how it stocks against the other "Summer Blockbusters" so far: CADILLAC MAN C+ FIRE BIRDS C BIRD ON A WIRE D Some may question my assigning letter grades to these flicks, but this *is* a competition to see who makes the most money, and grades *are* a commonly-used means assigning relative standards of mediocrity. :-) Not even the shallowest movie-goer can call these Works of Art. Although some have tried their best-- a few on this very newsgroup! :-) :-)
--- Robert Dorsett, disappointed in the summer's crop of movies so far. Internet: rdd@rascal.ics.utexas.edu UUCP: ...cs.utexas.edu!rascal.ics.utexas.edu!rdd
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews