Product: Flyboys [Blu-ray] (2006)
Rating: 2.0
Distinctly Earthbound
Flyboys is rather a disappointment even if you're not expecting much. The Lafayette Escadrille - a French squadron of American pilots who fought in the First World War before the USA entered the conflict - is a great subject for a film, but somehow keeps on falling short. William Wellman's semi-autobiographical Lafayette Escadrille was so brutally re-edited by the studio that he never made another film, yet Tony Bill's film feels like it could have done with a firmer hand somewhere down the line. Rather than a gritty, brutally realistic war movie it harks back to silent cinema and WW2 flagwavers, concentrating on often-cartoonish heroics by one-dimensional characters unmemorably played by a bland cast. With a charismatic star in the lead this might not have been an insurmountable problem, but with only Jean Reno as their commander providing any star quality the film is often as flat as the ill-advised digital photography that makes much of the film look like a Turner TV movie at times. Even on the small screen its lack of detail, depth and limited colour range are distractingly problematic. It doesn't make particularly good use of its 138-minute running time and there's surprisingly little sense of time or place either. The characters' attitudes are often more late than early-20th century while its attitude to accuracy is schizophrenic: it gets a lot of pertinent small details right while larger ones slip by unchecked if they look cool enough (if the film is to be believed, the German air force consisted almost entirely of red triplanes).As vanity projects go (the film was allegedly largely financed by co-star David Ellison's billionaire father), it's certainly not as disastrous as Gunbus/Sky Bandits, but like that forgotten box-office fiasco it suffers from trying to make an old-fashioned gung ho adventure set in the one war in which such comic book heroics have never seemed at home. Using the industrial killing fields of the first modern war as a backdrop for an action movie seems almost like setting The Great Escape in Auschwitz. But even ignoring that, it fails to work on its own terms as a simple adventure story. There's far too much unconvincing melodrama, be it James Franco carrying out an unlikely rescue of a pilot crashed in No Man's Land or an even more unlikely rescue of his sweetheart and her siblings from behind German lines. However, even these cannot prepare you for the absurdity of the way he finally takes on the dastardly homicidal Hun in the underwhelming finale: all that's missing is Franco saying "Sayonara, sucker!" It's not that such things couldn't or didn't happen as that the film fails to sell them in a more cynical age.But the biggest problem is the aerial scenes, primarily dependent on Cgi. You may not always be able to see the joins, but it's often curiously unconvincing as weightless planes defy the laws of aerodynamics for a cool shot, with the mayhem often cut short because computer-rendering time is so expensive. The camera may be able to get right in the thick of the action, but you never once feel like you're flying with the characters and it's never as impressive as the kind of footage the likes of Skeets Kelly and Johnny Jordan were able to get in the The Blue Max and Aces High, let alone earlier classics like Wings and The Dawn Patrol. And there's the problem that when you know it's just pixels rather than real people in real planes, all sense of danger and peril is gone. CGI may be easier and safer, but who says it SHOULD be easier? The choreography of the dogfights isn't that impressive either - for the first half of the film adequate seems to be the aim, with only a sequence where the pilots take on German planes strafing refugee columns really catching fire and living up to its potential. Even an attack on a Zeppelin seems more okay than inspired. Certainly there's nothing in the film to compare to the dazzling but brief Hell's Angels scenes in The Aviator. Adding to the general lack of inspiration is Trevor Rabin's score, which wears the film's temp track proudly on its sleeve - parts of it follow The Patriot so closely that you wonder why they didn't just give John Williams a screen credit of his own.It's watchable enough if you're in an undemanding mood, and Jennifer Decker makes an appealing leading lady, but it's hard to shake the feeling that the material would have worked better as a weekly TV series - though, if it were anything like this film, one that would probably be cancelled after a handful of episodes.