Flyboys

For my first film review I have chosen Flyboys, directed by Tony Bill. If you come back often you will find that I don't give high reviews of most films. As my mother in law likes to point out, I am a snot when it comes to movies, and I believe that really great films are few and far between. Most of what comes out nowadays is garbage. And yet I still watch...

Going into this film I expected to find a warm and fuzzy Memphis Belle type of story, set in World War I instead of WWII. I wasn’t disappointed. Overall I enjoyed the film despite the predictability and some of the hokey plot devices.

When the American pilots first join the French air fighting force, they are introduced to Reed Cassidy (Martin Henderson), the salty veteran of the fighting force. He has a pet lion and treats the new pilots poorly. After ten seconds of screen time for Cassidy I knew that several things would happen: Cassidy would form a bond with Rawlings (James Franco), Cassidy would die heroically in an air battle with the Germans and Rawlings would avenge Cassidy’s death by killing the pilot who killed Cassidy. I was right on all three accounts.

Rawlings begins a love relationship with a young French girl, and rescues her from the invading Germans. I thought this was to be an over-wrought love story. But here I was thrown a curveball. After promising to find her in Paris, Rawlings fails to make contact with her at the end of the film, and returns home to the US without her. This was one redeeming plotline: the guy doesn’t always get the girl.

The battle scenes in this film were well thought out and executed. There was only one scene that disappointed me. At one point Rawlings sees that one of his fellow pilots has crash landed in the middle of a trench battle. Rawlings conveniently finds a place close to the battle field where he can land, manages to run between the opposing armies’ lines to his friend’s downed plane without being shot, frees his friend, whose hand is pinned under the wing, and gets both himself and his comrade back to the trench without being shot, though a French soldier who comes to assist is shot to pieces. It was just a little bit too much. There was one great part to this scene, however. Rawlings is unable to free his buddy, so he employs a shovel and hacks the man’s hand off in order to save him. Anytime a man has his hand whacked by a spade, something is going well.

It was nice to see a film that glorified the dogfight pioneers of World War I. We’ve seen many movies about WWII air battles (Belle, Pearl Harbor, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Catch 22, Tora Tora Tora, The Tuskegee Airmen), and I am fascinated by WWII aircraft (Spitfires, P-51s, B-17s, P-38s). But there hasn’t been anything worthwhile about the birth of dog fighting until now.

James Franco was very good in his role as Rawlings. He proved here that he is just more than a pretty face, and that he can handle the role, instead of supporting roles, like in the Spiderman movies. But the guy who stole the show was Jean Reno, who played captain Renault. Reno has appeared in such films as Ronin, French Kiss, Mission: Impossible, The Da Vinci Code, and my favorite The Professional (if you haven’t seen it, do so). Reno has a demeanor that always steals the show, and he did it again in this one.

If I had to give this film a rating, it would be a 6 out of ten. It was good once, but I probably won’t see it again. The PG-13 rating meant that you could sit down with the kiddies and not worry about them seeing something you don’t want them to see. The violence is minimal, that there is no harsh language or nudity.

Next film review: Black Book (Zwartboek), directed by Paul Verhoeven.