ROB COHEN
Bil’s rating (out of 5): 0.
USA, 2005. Columbia Pictures Corporation, Original Film, Phoenix Pictures, Laura Ziskin Productions, AFG Talons Productions. Screenplay by W.D. Richter. Cinematography by Dean Semler. Produced by Mike Medavoy, Neal H. Moritz, Laura Ziskin. Music by BT. Production Design by Jonathan Lee, J. Michael Riva. Costume Design by Lizzy Gardiner. Film Editing by Stephen E. Rivkin.
There are times when I realize that I can be a little too hard on Hollywood action films by expecting them to have deeply realized characters and complex plots. However, it’s not asking too much that they make sense, which Stealth most definitely does not. A huge bomb at the box office (a $130 million dollar budget that barely recouped $30 million), and deservedly so, it stars Josh Lucas, Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel as fighter pilots who are really pissed off when the Air Force adds a fourth plane to their crew: an unmanned super-jet with a super-computer brain that can do super-anything except follow orders. Before you know it the plane is going HAL and endangering lives, forcing Lucas to circumvent its flight plan when the plane takes a theoretical bombing exercise seriously and nearly starts a third World War. Tough guys, stupid girls and endless sequences of planes flying around for no reason dominate this voyage into the inane, plus it’s totally boring and pointless to boot.