Product: Flyboys [Blu-ray] (2006)
Rating: 1.0
Most poorly-produced film I've seen in a decade
For starters, the plot of Flyboys is predictable from start to finish. Hot-shot American pilot joins French Escadrille, defies French veterans, romances local girl, becomes hero. Although the plot is completely unoriginal, the movie loses all credibility as soon as the action starts.There are plenty of reviews that tell how flawed this movie is from a historical perspective, so I won't get into that.The special effects that some reviewers called "spectacular" were cheap, tacky, unrealistic, and downright laughable. The most glaring example is during dogfights when the aircraft guns are fired. The smoke from the guns was shown traveling ahead of the aircraft, all the way to the enemy aircraft in fact. Smoke coming out of an aircraft flying at any speed would dissipate immediately to the rear. Even if there were tracer rounds back then (which there weren't), they wouldn't emit thick black smoke.Some storyline points were simply ridiculous.When one of the pilots crash lands, the hero lands his plane in crossfire of a trench battle on rocky, cratered ground littered with jagged pieces of metal to save him. This is ridiculous by itself. Then when he finds his buddy's hand trapped under the plane, he amputates it with one swing of a lightweight field shovel instead of simply lifting the plane off his hand (which he easily could have done with a cloth-covered aircraft).The hero repeatedly borrows his plane from the squadron to visit the local girl, without even a reprimand from the squadron commander. In one scene, German soldiers occupy the house with the woman and the children inside. At least one soldier is standing guard outside. The hero lands his plane a couple of hundred yards away, walks to the house, and rescues them, undetected by the Germans. Then when he starts his engine to leave, every head turns, alert to the engine sound. But of course they're too late to catch him.In one scene, just after the squadron lands from a dogfight, the hero decides to take off again by himself. Seconds later he is seen singlehandedly shooting up a line of German fighter planes, neatly parked in a row at an undefended airfield.I'm a small plane pilot, so I could go on about cloth-covered planes with 80-horsepower engines doing vertical climbs and jet-fighter maneuvers. But sadly, the realism was much worse in other ways.This movie was so badly done, I started fast forwarding half way through.