Review of Fire Birds (1990) by -Mitchie- - — 17 Jul 2009

There's nothing particularly exciting about Fire Birds, nothing that you couldn't get in another, better movie. If it weren't for the certainly big budget fight scenes involving helicopters and explosions, I would have to wonder how Nicolas Cage and Tommy Lee Jones got convinced to star in a B-movie like this.

The film tells the tale of Brad Little (Jones), a seasoned helicopter pilot who has been asked to train a bunch of new pilots on how to fly the Apache helicopter in order to stop a South American drug cartel from sending their evil drugs to the United States. The movie is so anti-drugs that at one point, while exploding an enemy plane, a character yells, "Snort that, sucker!".

I'm sorry. Please don't get the impression that this is a comedy. There are a few moments when the movie verges into hilarity, such as when Cage yells out a list of words that rhyme during a flight simulation, or when Jones explains the difficulty of air-to-air combat by saying that a pilot will be as "busy as a three-peckered goat." But these moments are few and far between, with the rest of the movie being boring and cliched.

When Little begins training his new pilots, he takes a keen interest in Jake Preston (Cage), all gung-ho and a natural when it comes to maneuvering during combat. Little realizes that Preston reminds him of himself at a much younger age. The two work together to overcome Preston's debilitating eye dominance problem, which could destroy his entire career. All of the blood sweat and tears that Little and Preston put into overcoming that eye dominance thing is for one ultimate goal: protecting the greatest country in the world from the sleaziest people in the world. Drugs are killing Americans every day!

Preston is in love with another helicopter pilot - a woman. Their relationship consists of him being arrogant and insensitive, and her falling head over heels in love with him for it. There's one incredible scene where they have an entire conversation made up of aircraft-themed sexual double entendres. "You've got your brain in your cockpit," she scolds him. No joke.

And so on. Once Preston decides to give it his all, there's the requisite training montage and then it's off to fight those damn dirty South Americans. There is one bad guy in particular who flies a black helicopter and represents all of the evil in the entire world. As you can imagine, it is imperative that Preston conquers the villain. Do you think he will manage the feat?

Fire Birds is not a very good movie, I guess, but I'd be more inclined to call it boring before I'd call it bad.