Stealth English Movie
Films about aerial bravura are as common to Hollywood as films about love at the time of parental opposition in Hindi.
They have a certain function and a flair that goes beyond simple arithmetic and geography of a time-tested genre.
From Tom Cruise in "Top Gun" to Mel Gibson in "Air America", aerial machismo is big in Hollywood. The trouble with "Stealth" is its borrowed wealth of sinewy action, yielding nothing but an over-sweaty presentation. The projection of the action is purely from the videogames point of view.
The action sucks... It sucks you into it and then exhales so fast your hopes of arriving at any conclusion about aerial enterprise are dashed to the ground.
There are a number of brave-hearts on the block, all looking like models at a provincial air-show in a border town where the air fighters are fighting a terrible bout of loose motions first, a loosely motioned script next.
The stress is on building up a personal and professional life for each fighter pilot. So we see the Black American pilot courting the Thai girl in meadows that stretch from here to eternity... certainly much further than the screenwriter's vision.
Talented charismatic actors like Josh Lucas and Jamie Foxx (the latter was lately a revelation as Ray Charles in the biopic and won a best actor Oscar for the role) are reduced to posing in helmets, on sunset boulevards and pubs with girls who say things like, "Wannna go for a pee".
The maladies that this malfunctional movie suffers are so myriad, you wonder why director Rob Cohen bothered to employ himself when the film-editor and the cinematographer had, between them, chalked out the plot's whole bang-bang game plan.
Then you suddenly remember... Cohen had recently made the skidding revving screeching and whining film on wheels "The Fast & The Furious".
And you realise, "Stealth" is nothing but Fast & Furious in mid-air. Though, let's quickly add, there's nothing fast or furious about this scare-air fare. The airborne action cuts through the sky, slicing the screen into super-FX smithereens, smashing all claims to coherence and reason.
For sure, the aerial scenes are well shot. Scenes of planes crashing into brightly lit city-centres are breathtaking.
But what are we finally looking at? Apocalypse as a videogame?
