Flyboys: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

Tony Bill's new World War I movie, "Fly Boys," is at its best when it's high up in its computer-generated skies. There, elegant, computer-generated fighter planes swoop dramatically through a ballet of computer-generated bullets.

The action scenes are brisk and beautiful--too beautiful, really--polished to such a degree that you watch the planes get hammered with gunfire, catch fire and blow smoke with the same emotional investment you might bring to, say, a video game featuring the same material.

Bill's approach to the First World War is to ignore its grisly realities. People repeatedly are killed in this movie, but you don't ever feel their loss. Instead, the film would rather romanticize and glorify war, so much so that the end result is a movie sucked free of authenticity.

But what a lovely lack of authenticity. For instance, when a Zeppelin looms high on the horizon in a later scene, you watch it knowing it's the money shot, only here to offer the inevitable bloom of a beautiful explosion. You sit waiting in comfort with no sense of dread or suspense even when it finally is attacked. As it breaks apart in stunning flashes of persimmon, the undercurrent is that war is pretty, which is, shall we say, somewhat fractured from reality and a good reason why it's so difficult to take the movie seriously.

There are other reasons, most of which stem from David S. Ward's risible script. At its core, "Fly Boys" is about the Lafayette Escadrille--a group of American expatriates who went to France in April 1916 to join the French air force. They include smoldering cowboy Blaine Rawlings (James Franco), boxer Eugene Skinner (Abdul Salis), stuffy Briggs Lowry (Tyler Labine), puffy-lipped Eddie Beagle (David Ellison), and Jensen (Philip Winchester), whose solid jaw belies a weakness he must eventually conquer.

Leading them is Capt. Thenault (Jean Reno), taunting them is Cassidy (Martin Henderson), who already has shot down his share of the enemy and has the attitude to prove it, and distracting them is Lucienne (Jennifer Decker), a lovely French lass who has stolen Blaine's heart and thus presents the possibility for rescue.

This could have been a better movie if none of its characters were allowed to interact. But since they must, it's in their stiff, rote conversations that the film becomes unredeemable and, at nearly 2.5 hours, unbearable. With the ongoing gloss, the tin dialogue and the broad echoes of "Star Wars," "Fly Boys" is about as far removed from the best examples of the genre--"Wings" and "Hell's Angels"--as it could get.

Grade: C-