Review of Flyboys (2006) by Markb. — 29 Nov 2006

Too bad they marred this otherwise very entertaining World War I action drama by banishing the cigarettes from it! Like Pearl Harbor and many other recent period pieces (but, thankfully, NOT Clint Eastwood's Flags Of Our Fathers) the producers decided to allow C.

Everett Koop and that humorless twerp played by William H. Macy in Thank You For Smoking act as their movie's very own personal Joseph L. Breen, and thus we get lots of bar scenes on the French wartime front in which lots of flyers have plenty of shots and snorts but no smokes.

Besides the obvious self-contradictory absurdity of allowing the movie's heroes to inflict all sorts of abuse upon their livers but not their lungs, this is a regrettable concession to political correctness in a movie that admirably makes no others.

It's a war film marked by no ironic subtext whatsoever as expatriate American flyers, fully committed to what they're doing and the rightness of it, enjoy wiping out their German opponents and racking up kills.

Not only is this a marked contrast to the 1980s mini-genre of historical dramas (the Young Guns movies and the incredibly ludicrous and loathsome Mobsters) that loaded their casts with Brat Packers and their scripts with attitudinal anachronisms, but it also is at philosophical odds with most WW I films made during the 1930s (Ace of Aces, The Dawn Patrol and of course All Quiet On The Western Front) which, being horrified reactions to the war's massive amounts of technologically-produced carnage and having been made BEFORE America was aware of just how evil and dangerous Hitler was, were as passionately antiwar as Johnny Got His Gun.

Flyers was quite courageous to, in this day and time, cling to the concept of any kind of warfare as heroic, noble and even romantic, and for that reason (if not also because World War I hasn't exactly been a pop-culture touchstone since Snoopy took on The Red Baron in the late 1960s) it was quickly and inevitably shot down in flames at the box office.

That's a shame; Flyboys is one of the most distinctive-LOOKING commercial films of 2006, with a tinted picture postcard feel that fully matches its period; it juggles its storylines and characters well; it features convincing airborne sequences and a sweet, resonant love story on the ground, and it sports nice work by Spider-Man's James Franco, using his James Deanish sensitivity to good advantage, and especially by Jean Reno (The Pink Panther) who, as the kind of commander I'll bet all ex-military personnel WISH they'd had, projects in spades that elusive quality that many actors try for but very few actually attain: effortless cool.