Flyboys - Review

Director: Tony Bill
Writers: Phil Sears/Blake Evans/D. Ward
Starring: James Franco/Jean Reno
Runtime: 140 minutes

A friend of mine said something interesting at the movies the other day: we've reached the age where a movie can be good simply because it's a "time waster."

He has a point. If you've seen enough movies, read enough scripts, and even dabbled in the making of a few films, you pretty much know what is coming down the pike as soon as the previews are over and the lion roars.

Take Flyboys. Utterly predictable, at times embarrassingly cliche, and yet...an okay time waster. A movie where you can pick and choose the good moments, and instantly forget the bad ones, then convince yourself that the movie was "all right."

Flyboys is about America's first fighter pilots. It takes place during WWI, prior to US involvement. It follows the trail of a half-dozen or so American boys who join the Lafayette Escadrille and fly bi-planes for the French. It's an interesting premise, one that could have made an excellent film. Instead, as with most things Hollywood these days, we get a pretty shameless retread of everything that has come before.

See if you can recognize these:

1) The broke rebel who joins up because he has nowhere else to go and because his family are all dead.
2) The cocky guy who freaks out and loses his nerve....but gets it back just in time.
3) The black man who is slighted in a bar, punches the guy out, then proves himself in the air.
4) The pudgy dude that has something to prove to his father, because his father thinks he's a wimp. In a time-saving move, this guy is also the southern racist who overcomes his bigotry so he can respect the guy in #3.
5) The veteran warrior. His friends are all dead, and he is staying in the war to kill his arch enemy: a German bad guy who flies a black plane and has no honor.

Most of the above takes place in the first fifteen minutes of the film. Following the screenwriter handbook, Messers. Sears, Evans, and Ward check their courage at the door and make sure they introduce all of the main characters as fast as they can. That done, they move onto the 'training montage,' where we watch the boys learn to fly in about five minutes. Then we meet the love interest.

And here's where you're slapping your head. Because James Franco as the rebel Rawlings is not a bad actor, and Jennifer Decker as Lucienne the French Maiden is absolutely superb. George Roy Hill once said that to make a great movie, all you have to do is cast it perfectly, and make the screenplay as good as it can be. After that, the movie films itself.

The scenes with Franco and Decker and very good. Sure, another cliche smacks you in the face as Lucienne is afraid to fall for Rawlings because he's going to die in the war. But after that, their relationship is pretty poignant. Director Tony Bill has the guts to let the actors act: Lucienne can't speak English, Rawlings can't speak French, and the director keeps it like that. And it's not hackneyed, parlez-vous giggle acting, either. It is so good compared to the rest of the dialogue and acting in the film that Bill either let them improvise, or one of the three writers was brought in specifically to write those scenes. (It's an old movie axiom that if you see two writers in the credits, get nervous; if you see three, leave the theater, because something was fundamentally wrong with the story and they started platooning writers to try and save it).

The scenes with Lucienne and Rawlings made me wish they had called the movie Flyboy, singular, and simply followed the story of this young pilot and this interesting girl. Similarly, Jean Reno turns in some good work (when doesn't he?) as the straight-laced commander of the unit. It would have been interesting to see more of him in the film, rather than watch him push the plot along.

But it's a 21st century action movie, where you can't go deep. I dig that, and by now, I've learned to accept it. And the action scenes are fairly good. I wouldn't be surprised if Tony Bill admitted that he'd heard the story of how George Lucas, short of time and cash, had used old war footage in the rough cut of Star Wars, just so he could show the pace of the film. The footage might have looked a lot like Bill's: fast, loose, close-ups of bad guys and good guys gritting their teeth, a giant Zeppelin as a Death Star, a black airplane for the Germanic Darth Vader.

Many of the explosions and special effects are a bit lame. Maybe the budget was tight. Don't expect Black Hawk Down's booms and plumes. The airplanes are mostly digital, which is a sad state of affairs in movies these days. No matter how good the computers get, it is very, very hard to fool the human eye, so you feel a bit silly watching movies like Flyboys because you might as well be watching a flight simulator video game. Still, the work is passable, and the actors do a good job of being scared (the bad guy's on my tail), angry (I can't believe he shot down my friend), morose (what's this all for, anyway?), sad (I can't believe he shot down my other friend), vengeful (I'm going to kill him for shooting down my friends).

Leaving the theater, I went with my friend's take: an okay time waster. It gave me a chance to look forward to Jennifer Decker's next film, because I think she's got something, and it gave me a new appreciation of James Franco, whom I believe can separate himself from the other young, good-looking types once he gets some more seasoning.

And no, I'm not a heartless movie snob: it gave me an appreciation for the men who fought and died before their country even asked them to go. It wouldn't matter if you made a soap opera about them, because it wouldn't change a thing. They gave all, and they deserve the glory.