Johnson seems to be playing John Wayne to Milius’ John Ford, and he’s wiped off the screen every time Dafoe shows up.
FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER MOVIE
Worse, the movie has Brad Johnson, who was so unforgettably forgettable as the aviator in “Always,” at its center. Besides, the technical standard for such scenes has become almost impossibly high and, by “Top Gun” standards, “Flight of the Intruder” (rated PG-13 for explosions and fisticuffs) is pretty cheesy. The aerial combat sequences aren’t stirring enough to cancel out the cliches.
Its banalities don’t do justice to the war or the Americans who served in it. That war, and our feelings about it, are far more complicated than this film allows for. Milius attempts to recapture our feelings for the rousingly patriotic war movies of 50 years ago, but the kind of traditional, true-blue sentiments he’s parading seem out of place in this Vietnam setting. Hollywood, and not Vietnam, is this film’s real point of reference. Milius has an expansive temperament but it’s expansive here in ways that seem emotionally fraudulent. But the Ford war film that this movie draws on, “They Were Expendable,” was considerably darker and more complex than this straight-arrow tub-thumper. Milius, working from a script by Robert Dillon and David Shaber based on the Stephen Coonts bestseller, tries for a John Ford effect. He’s a perfect contrast to Jake’s strong silent dullness. Virgil is one small step away from the I-love-the-smell-of-napalm-in-the-morning breed of soldier, but his manias are presented as screw-loose heroism. Arriving for duty, he pauses for a moment to whiff the aroma of combat. Virgil is on his third tour, and he’s dangerously gung-ho. Virgil Cole (Willem Dafoe), joins the squadron. His fixation takes flight when a new bombardier, Lt.
He longs for a real mission and, after his bombardier buddy is killed, he becomes fixated on an unauthorized maneuver-a bombing raid on a missile depot in downtown Hanoi. The strategic targets for which he risks his life are mostly unpopulated forests, abandoned huts.
Jake (Cool Hand) Grafton (Brad Johnson), who pilots an A-6 Intruder, a low-altitude bomber, over enemy airspace in North Vietnam. It certainly won’t find salvation in its mundane script, direction, performances. It’s mediocre, but it comes at a time when audiences may be in the mood to see even a sub-par film about American bomber and fighter pilots braving the odds and strutting their codes of honor.Īs a movie-movie antidote to the harrowing nightly news, “Flight of the Intruder” (selected theaters) may have found its commercial salvation. In the air, Flight offers a few jolts on the ground, it’s merely airheaded.Originally set for release last spring, John Milius’ Vietnam saga “Flight of the Intruder” has, by chance, been released into a climate of war. When he’s not laying on an irrelevant romance between the pilot and a navy widow (a wasted Rosanna Arquette), Milius is dishing out the same tired, right-wing, macho bullshit that made his Red Dawn, Big Wednesday and Farewell to the King such audience endurance tests. Showing how the Intruder works might have been engrossing (Coonts was a navy pilot) but not to director John Milius. The flyboys are tired of practicing they want to get behind enemy lines and blow away something real. Twitchy Willem Dafoe is on hand as the bombardier, square-jawed Brad Johnson is the pilot, and blustery Danny Glover is the squadron leader who keeps yelling at his charges from an aircraft carrier. And there’s another catch: The Intruder carries no defensive weapons. It’s dandy at the job, depending on the coordination of pilot and bombardier. The techno part involves the A-6 Intruder, a low-altitude bomber designed to destroy targets in the dark. Hunt producer Mace Neufeld is hoping lightning will strike again with Flight, based on a Clancy-like 1986 bestseller by Stephen Coonts about navy pilots in North Vietnam, circa 1972. The film of Clancy’s Hunt for Red October couldn’t touch the book for the kind of military details that make armchair Pattons orgasmic, but it was huckstered into a hit anyway. Techno-Thrillers are the hot thing these days, thanks to Tom Clancy.
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