Sunday, August 28, 2016

Flight of Fury

Flight of Fury; action, USA, 2007; D: Michael Keusch, S: Steven Seagal, Steve Toussaint, Angus Macinnes

Air Force pilot Sands escapes from a military prison during surgery. He is caught after perventing a store robbery, but given a second chance by the military: namely, a new high-tech Air Force Stealth plane, capable of becoming invisible, has been stolen by its own test pilot Ratcher, who handed it over to some Arab paramilitary in the Middle East, and Sands has to get it back - or else the US military will simply bomb the hangar with the Stealth plane. Sands storms the hangar, kills everyone, saves colleague Jannick and then uses the Stealth plane to shoot Ratcher who tries to escape in an F-16.

"Flight of Fury" is one of those terrible action movies after which you have to watch "Citizen Kane" and "Casablanca" for cinematic disinfection. Quite frankly, there is simply not much to write here: it follows several typical cliches of action films from the 80s and 90s (the hero, a convict, is given a chance to clear his name and has a limited amount of time to perform a secret operation), except here in a far more banal, humorless, inept and trashy edition, exacerbated further by Steven Seagal's arrogant acting and ignorant writing. The opening sequence is ludicrous (why would the personnel of a military prison let a janitor clean the floor of a nearby cell, just when Sands is being interrogated and about to be sedated?), though "Flight" is not even unintentionally comical after that: it is just plain boring. It has boring scenes, boring dialogues, boring events..., all adding to one monotone film without any sense to live it up or escape from this grey area of preditctable routine we are accustomed to in so many other action films. Having to sit through these 90 minutes of dated macho primitivism is just plain a drag. Not even the finale where Sands and Ratcher are flying in a Stealth and a F-16 plane works, since they are never in the same shot (except in one quick scene), and thus the viewers do not know who is chasing whom or how they are interacting, since the two planes might as well be at two separate points in the world. The sad thing is that one woman, the villain who will be killed, is a lesbian, as well, giving the film even a touch of homophobia to it, as if its creativity-phobia was not already enough.

Grade;-

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