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"Flyboys"
MGM
Directed by Tony Bill
Written by Phil Sears, Blake T. Evans and Davis S. Ward
Starring: James Franco, Martin Henderson, David Ellison and Jean Reno
Rated PG-13/139 minutes
Opened Sept. 22, 2006
Three out of four stars
"Flyboys" soars on its B-movie wings from a sunny sky of popcorn clouds that hover far, far away from the hell-on-earth battlefields of "Saving Private Ryan" and "Black Hawk Down." This corny, bugle-blaring, endearingly old-fashioned-yes, even romantic-war flick manages to play rum-dummy-dum without being too dumb.
The slicked-back, idealistic American lads who converge on World War I-era France to join the Air Force and gun down some Huns are so clichéd, you can imagine them leaping off the cover of some 1950s adventure magazine for very, very young boys.
And yet, the screenplay by Phil Sears, Blake T. Evans and David S. Ward is so sincerely awed by the wartime heroism and fraternal bonding of its golly-gee-willickers characters that it succeeds in killing our time as neatly and pleasantly as the Americans kill their German enemies in this PG-13-rated universe.
James Franco-who's always looked like a time-traveler from a kinder era in which kids wrangled up cows and enjoyed it-looks right at home as Blaine Rawlings, a mid-Western rancher who skips jail (he punched a foreclosure-threatening banker) by sailing over to Europe and joining the French in their struggle against Germany.
Hopefully, audience members will have read up on their World War I history because "Flyboys" doesn't provide much context. We only learn that one side shoots at the other side and that German soldiers have perfected the art of stomping, frowning and rummaging through cupboards in French villas.
Rawlings' cohorts are the usual bunch of "guys with troubles," including an arrogant jerk (Tyler Labine) that refuses to bunk with the token African-American (Abdul Salis), and, in a noble stab at post-"Private Ryan" wartime-is-not-fun-time depth, a wannabe hero (Philip Winchester) with a honey back home has a nervous breakdown after his first aerial dogfight. I half expected Tom Hanks to march into the room and slap some sense back into the guy.
The battles up in the air are hit and miss, quality-wise. We get close-ups of the actors in their planes and get little sense of the wind and speed lashing at their naked cheeks (say it with me: "blue screen"). The wider shots are more dynamic, as in the scene in which a plane goes kamikaze on a German zeppelin. Sure, it looks like a video game, but a video game with really neat graphics.
Franco's character gets romantically involved with a young French miss (Jennifer Decker) who raises her dead brother's kids and delivers cheese to the local brothel. The filmmakers deliver their own brand of cheese in the gooey romance between the two.
When the music swelled and the lovers embraced, I simultaneously wanted to throw up and hug this dim-witted movie with the balls to be square in today's age of sobering, shaky-cam war flicks.
