Review: Stealth

That's right. I went to see Stealth. I had a 5$ gift certificate, and gave my friend the other 5$. The third on the trip payed full price.

Stealth is a hard movie to review, because going into it I was expecting it to be a waste of time, such as XXX, and the Fast and the Furious, by the same director. I was right. There is a point to this movie somewhere inside of it's 121 minutes (!!), but far be it for me to find it. It was like watching a soap opera with planes: Stuff happens, but by the end it was kind of all mush anyway.

The basis of the movie was that Stealth fighters (400 applied, 3 got the job) Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, and a terribly non-colourful Josh Lucas are shipped to the USS Abe Lincoln (It's just not snowflake day without a lamb taco!), to meet their fourth fighter friend, while sitting around eating apples and a grape popsicle. I shit you not. That's where the bad dialogue starts. "Who wants a popsicle?" "Do you have grape?" And so on. The fighter is actually an Artificially intelligent thing, but they call it EDI, which stands for something to do with "Deep Infiltrator" that of course, gets a joke about it by Foxx, who's relegated to token black dude in this movie.

And after pointless scenes of just random stuff (while reviewing the EDI, it gratuitously shows Foxx shirtless and dancing to funk in red sandals in his room), and as many secretive shots of the lady's ass, stuff starts happening. They bring the EDI out into the field (where they call him Tin Man), so that he can observe them doing random, pointless stuff (or shooting down a terrorist cell without hurting any third parties by shooting an imploding missile that explodes, after flying almost into space, or something). He then learns specific things by his "teacher", and the leader of the flock, Lucas, best known for being a second hand faceless guy, and then the inevitable happens.

The plane gets hit by lightning.

This is the part that you think "well maybe something neat will happen, like he'll kill people". But it doesn't. He decides to go around and do his own work on missions, reacting on what he's learned from his "teacher", the human. And anytime he disagrees with the pilots, he replies to them in his cool but lame, 2001:A Space Odyssey HAL copy. He puts the team in jeopardy, people get upset, they take him apart and check him out.

At this time it's discovered that the computer has decided to DOWNLOAD EVERY SONG ON THE INTERNET for no specific reason. That's right. I said it. The weirdest part is that out of all of that, he picks the weirdest songs by Incubus that nobody's heard. How convenient.

The movie continues, the token black guy of course gets killed, and bad dialog tends to overshadow even the idea that this movie was ever going to be cool to begin with. The Biel stealth crashes in North Korea (the new Russia in army movies), and Lucas gets swivelled into a plot by their Navy leader to cover his ass by killing everyone. Lucas gets out, and saves the girl, but not without the help of the newly reformed Stealth plane, that now likes people because it wants to do the right thing and has feelings, because the lightning strike made it evolve faster. A big flashy ending happens, people fall in love, and I was tired.

The ending was viewable as soon as you saw a cockpit in a plane that didn't need one, if you were wondering what exactly happened. It was that bad. It was consistently bad, and funny, so much that two of the three got bored of making fun of it, the other had ADD.

Really, the only reason I gave a point to this movie is for the audacity of Hollywood markets that believed that this thing would actually sell. It cost $100 million to make, and it's probably never going to make that in it's theater run. What scares me is that the mass audience also realized it would suck. Maybe they're getting smart?

Oh right, I forgot, Fantastic Four is still making loads of cash.

* of *****