Product: Flyboys [Blu-ray] (2006)
Rating: 1.0
Crash and burn
As someone with a great interest in WWI, I had high hopes for "Flyboys" but found it to be a rather excruciating experience watching one-dimensional cardboard cutouts religiously follow every single last cliche' in the Hollywood playbook. A movie about a group of Americans who violated their nation's neutrality laws to fight for a foreign power in a senseless, fratricidal war, I was going to give it 2 stars for the impressive dogfighting scenes, thinking at least some of it was performed by actual pilot reenactors, until I found out that it was all CGI-generated and technologically anachronistic to boot. In any case, all the action in the world couldn't save a movie with such a predictable story and such generically boring characters.A professor once told me that a quick test of the quality of a novel or movie's characterization is whether you remember the characters' names. This movie was so mind-numbing, I was lucky to remember my own name by the end, never mind the protagonist's! I don't know if these were bad actors or they just had bad material to work with, but my family and I certainly didn't remember anyone's names, and were forced to refer to the characters by their physical attributes. Unfortunately, only a few of them- Blackie, Fatty and Spiderman-guy- had any kind of unique features, while the rest seemed as undistinguishable as snowflakes. We were glad when one of them got his hand cut off, because he then gained an identity as "Hookhand", and we were hoping the others would similarly discover their individuality- i.e. Burnedface, Lack-nose, One-eye - but we were disappointed.As terrible as the characters were- and I can't describe to you the interminable horror of watching a monolingual American try to woo a retarded French girl- the plot was even more disgraceful. If you've ever seen any sports movie, you've seen this one: A motley group of American misfits initially get their clocks cleaned by big, bad German bullies, led by the "Black Falcon." Our scrappy Yanks get their act together and start to hold their own against the German B-team. When the Black Falcon knocks out our ace, the young hero vows revenge, which he dramatically achieves with the unexpected help of a character previously thought to be useless. Look up the word "formulaic" in the dictionary and the definition will probably say "the plot of 'Flyboys.'" Skip this one, and let's just pretend it doesn't exist.