The Home of Steven Barnes
Author, Teacher, Screenwriter


Saturday, July 30, 2005

Stealth (2005)

I never thought I'd see a live action version of "Team America, World Police" but this jingoistic, simplistic, stupid, spectacular and exciting movie fits the bill.  Damn.  I wantd to dislike it--I KNEW just from the coming attractions that they would pull a Sacrifical Negro, clearing the way for white characters to have sex...and I was right, by the way...but I ended up liking the movie anyway.  It rips off 2001, Top Gun, Dr. Strangelove, Wargames, and any number of other, better films.  But the tale of a computerized super-fighter/bomber jet just kept getting my pulse up.  There are these three super pilots selected for the program (as Mod Squad used to say: "One Black. One White.  One blonde.") and thn there's EDI, the HAL-9000-voiced killer machine.  Well, some of the plot twists are predictable months away, others are a bit subtler than that.  The dialogue actually isn't bad in its own cheesy way, the effects are often GREAT, Jamie Foxx gets to die protecting not just white people, but white people's MACHINES (is that a step up?  back? Sideways?  Good question.  But if I can suffer through watching black folks die for the entertainment of white audiences...and trust me, the statistics show that white audiences LOVE to watch us die...then you can suffer through spoilers.  Heh heh.)  At any rate, in some way I'm not completely certain I understand, they won me over.  The puppet strings were so nakedly apparent that some part of me relaxed. the idea of a super-anti-terrorist force willng to cross national borders to Git Them Ter'rists was sort of sick in a good ol' boy kinda way.  And man oh man, there's a parachuting sequence that would have been at home in the hottest James Bond pre-title sequence imaginable.  And there's Jessica Biel's super-hot body.  Yum.  You know, it's stupid, offensive and jingoistic, but God help me, I liked it just fine.  Put your brain on hold and give it a "B"

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