FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER
A film review by Scott T. Eggimann
Copyright 1991 Scott T. Eggimann
Capsule review: War movie seemed targeted to a freshman,
all-male audience. This movie is more interesting if one has a
small background knowledge of the Vietnamese war and the
technical jargon that surrounds modern warfare. This movie
would do a lot better if it was not released at the time of the
War in the Gulf. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4); might be worth a
low-cost matinee show.
Are movie audiences willing to pay good money for something they can watch on the nightly news? If the movie's lack of success in its early weeks is any indication, FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER has already crashed and burned.
The movie is based fairly accurately on Steven Coonts' novel of the same name. If you read the book, you might not want to see the movie, or at least be ready for disappointment. The movie follows the book until just about the end, and then things change dramatically. If you haven't read the book, do yourself a favor; it's much better than the movie.
Lieutenant Jake "Cool Hand" Grafton (Brad Johnson) follows the footsteps of all the classic heroes. So what is the problem with Jake (or is it Johnson)? He never seems to live up to the super hero image he was portrayed to be in the book. I kept wanting to accept him as the hero, but this never happened. If Johnson had more of a domineering personality (like Tom Cruise in TOP GUN, for example), then Jake might live up to he the hero the movie wants him to be.
Danny Glover plays the tough Flight Commander, Frank Camparelli, although he too is hard to accept as a character in a serious role. In my opinion, the only strong performance in this movie comes from Willem Dafoe as Virgil Cole, Jake's renegade bombardier. Dafoe seems to cast himself into the Vietnam-era movies, perhaps contributing in part to his success in this film.
One disappointing part of the movie is that few moments are devoted to the A-6A Intruder's breathtaking takeoffs and landings from the deck of the aircraft carrier. Despite the fact that the movie was actually filmed on an aircaft carrier, this enormous resource was never exploited.
FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER is second in a generation of high-tech thrillers. The first being Tom Clancy's HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (ironically, by the same producers). Consequently, it is not too surprising that FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER suffers the same technical misgivings that the Hunt for Red October had: the aphrodisiac that pulls readers to Coonts' and Clancy's books is the great attention to detail. Coonts painfully describes evading a surface-to-air missile (SAM) (from Page 6 of FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER):
"There's the SAM! Two o'clock! Jake fought back the urge to urinate. Both men watched the white rocket exhaust while Grafton squeezed the chafe-release button on the right throttle with his forefinger. Each push released a small plastic container into the slipstream where it dispersed a cloud of metallic fibers--the chaff--that would echo radar energy and form a false target on the enemy operator's radar screen. The pilot carefully nudged the stick foreword and dropped to 200 feet above the ground. He jabbed the chaff button four more times in quick succession..."
The movie shows us this high tension scene in five seconds. There is no explanation to what is actually happening. I found myself running home to read the book again to satisfy the questions the movie left unanswered.
The movie plays with two subplots and I'm not sure if they really belong in the film. In the book they play a more important role in breathing life into the characters, in the movie they simply get in the way. Jake's relationship with Callie (Rosanna Arquette) seems superficial and unimportant (where in the book Callie plays a pivotal role in saving Jake's sanity) and the "Mad Shitter" never really lives up to the suspense it could have been.
The success of the techno-thriller novel is that a reader can fly an A-6A Intruder just by reading along. The movie fails on this level. Maybe I simply expected too much from a good book?
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