Oyoyoyoyoyoyoy

"Pardon my C-cup". A line that is sure to become one of the best remembered movie lines off all time, along with "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn", and "I'm a mog, half dog, half man. I'm my own best friend". The movie Stealth certainly had plenty of action. Every two minutes I was getting up to hurl over the seat in front of me, a condition brought on by the waves of cliches and pointless scenes that assaulted me. I mean...it was...an...okay movie.... Okay, that's a lie.
Really, it wasn't a completely terrible movie. But it was by no means a good movie either. There was nothing particularly surprising about it, no twist ending that no one saw coming. The cliches came hot and heavy, the characters were almost developed and the special effects, while good, were nothing that hasn't been seen a million times before. The thing that elevates this movie slightly above any other of a million other mindless action flicks is that the acting was actually pretty good. Sadly, the material that they were acting out was not so good, but with what they had they managed to do the best they could. It's like shovelling a pile of poop - you may be the quickest, strongest, and best poop slinger out there, but at the end of the day it's all still crap.
There were so many problems with this movie that it became an unintentional comedy. For example, in one scene the intrepid hero fires a missile (that's one missile) into a clump of trees at the edge of a forest. There is a huge explosion. I'm okay with that. But what about the second explosion, and the third explosion, creating a fireball a half a klick long. I'm pretty sure that the missile explodes once and that's it (I'll admit I may be wrong I suppose), and there was nothing else there to create explosions. Unless those were gasoline trees, where we get fuel from the sap. Another explosion, um, scene features our intrepid hero firing a missile into a hangar at an airfield. This time the many explosions is more believable, given the materials present in the hangar, and I think he fired more than one this time. They show people outside of the hangar being flung backwards by the huge explosion. Somehow, though, two guys manage to not be flung back, even though their buddy standing right beside them is flung back dozens of yards.
And let's speak of our intrepid hero. It's at least halfway through the movie before there is any indication that he is the focus of the movie. Up to that point, he's actually a sleezeball and that's about it. And he reveals to another character that he is in love with Jessica Biel (the lone woman pilot). And it shows in how he looked at her while going off to sleep with another woman, an occurance that is apparently quite common. Now that's love. As my brother said, "it's like they opened up the book of movie cliches and pulled out thirty of them for the movie" (or something like that). The characters were not developed at all. They certainly tried character development over the first half of the movie, but it just didn't work at all. By the time the actual action started in earnest, I didn't care about these characters any more than I had when I walked in. I was rooting for Jamie Foxx's character because he was the actor I knew best. That was it.
It was supposed to be an action packed drama. It turned into a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 comedy. I felt sorry for Jeff because he was sitting between me and Peter, and we kept him busy swivelling his head back and forth to listen to our comments that were much more entertaining than the movie itself.
Really, we should have been expecting that though. Considering our evening started with us grabbing tickets to see the 7:50 showing of Four Brothers, only to find at 7:35 that we had purchased tickets for a movie not opening for two days, seeing a bad movie was not surprising. The planes looked cool though. And I found it amazing how much stuff they could get away with simply by placing this movie in "the near future" (actual subtitle at the beginning of the movie). For instance, in "the near future" we will have satalites that can read fingerprints left on objects and identify a person. That can zoom down, and then see sideways, zooming in horizontally towards their subject. Planes that can fly at Mach 4 and go around the world without ever needing to refuel or worry about it (except when it becomes a plot device). This movie astounded me. Heck, I usually am amused by bad movies (see: Anacondas), but this one was too much.