From The Back Row... Stealth (2005)

Sometimes you want to see a film that makes no sense, a film that's just loud and brash, a popcorn flick. Despite that I should've known better than to pay good money to see Stealth.

Hands up, I should've heeded the warning on the poster; it's from the "from the director of XXX and The Fast And The Furious" after all. If I was to look at the Stealth poster with a pair of Rowdy Roddy Piper's magic glasses I'd see the word SHITE in big black letters on a white background. But I just couldn't help myself; somewhere inside me I knew it couldn't be as bad as XXX, could it?

Well.

OK so perhaps it isn't quite THAT bad, but by no stretch of the imagination could you say it's good. Put it this way, it makes Top Gun look like Shakespeare.

In a nutshell, it's a mess; it's not sure what it really wants to be (thriller? action movie? MTV video?) and suffers accordingly. The characters are one dimensional, the plot is way flimsy and not even Jessica Biel looking hot in a bikini or lots of things going bang can save it (I know, I didn't think that was possible either). Like a complete schmuck I waited until the end (curse you IMDB) for the end credit tease. That's 10 minutes of my life I'm not getting back, waiting around in the dark for a dodgy steadicam shot. I'm not counting the brain cells I lost watching the movie proper, I'd really get depressed then.

Still, as an experience it taught me the following..

• If you've spent billions of dollars on a supercool weapons system it's imperative that you deck out all the base hardware with groovy neon innards.
• If you're a female pilot in the future Naval Air Force be prepared to go into combat with a natty pair of hipsters and a skinny-fit t-shirt. Also, and this is most important, if shot down over enemy territory look for the nearest puddle to strip down to your skimpies and have wash in.
• You can never have too many shots of aircraft carriers (no, I'm lying, you can have too many).
• Career soldiers who have no taste for politics go mental over new technology and lose any trace of ethics or the command set they've followed throughout their career; everyone over a certain rank should obviously not be allowed to own anything with more oomph than a calculator.
• If you're a computer genius then it's perfectly reasonable to have a dumb name (as long as it's explained away with an equally dumb explanation). It's also a known fact that computer geeks have no ethics and like to waste their evenings talking code rather than entertaining their gorgeous trophy girlfriend.
• Computer generated flames are way better than real ones (no, I'm lying again).
• Just because you've blown a scary amount of money on the future of warfare you shouldn't worry about getting your ass sued when it downloads all the crappy 'rawk' MP3s it can get its virtual mitts on. It might be an "evolving" intelligence but that doesn't give it A) musical taste or B) an iTunes account.
• From the sky the world really does look like an atlas, with big yellow border lines and large letters telling you what the countries are called (I think this might be for the American audience though).
• If in doubt blow something up.
• If still in doubt do it again.
• The next generation of high-tech unmanned fighter plane will be ultra-maneouvrable, super-fast and sound like HAL9000's younger brother. Though protected against EMP it's inadvisable to leave it out in the rain as there wasn't enough left in the budget for lightning rods.

I'd wait for it to show up on Sky and miss it then, but if you do go see it at the cinema be sure to leave your brain at the door. And take ear plugs.

3/10

(this review appeared in a slightly different format on the SOMC forum)