Review of Flyboys (2006) by Matthew S — 26 Jan 2011

Flyboys is a very hard film for me to review. It would be pretty easy to blast the heck out of it for it's blatant historical innacuracies (Let's put it this way, it makes The Red Baron from 2008 look like a documentary on the subject), lazy writing, and dumb romance, but, pained as I am to say it about this Hollywood bastardization of a truly inspiring story, I enjoyed it. I had a good time watching this movie, which is more than I can say about that sadly-botchted effort I recently watched, by the name of The Red Baron.

From the beginning of the film, we are introduced to our main characters, all of whom are purportedly based off of real-life members of Lafayette Escadrille, turn out to be one-note cannon fodder for the aerial sequences, notable for being the first in movie history to feature motion-caputred planes. The dogfights are some of the better WWI-era ones I've seen, and are pleasing to the eye. One problem I do have with them however, is that they made a point to pain EVERY German plane red, and make it a triplane. I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain THAT reference. While I suppose you could say it's to make it easier for the viewer to tell Lafayette and the Germans apart, The Red Baron had a much more elegant solution to this problem that didn't seem blatantly out of place. When the film is on the ground it doesn't succumb to the mind-numbing tedium that other films of the genre have fallen to, for the most part. It helps that our cardboard cutout characters do play off of eachother well. The antagonist, however is painfully stereotypical. Tell me if you've seen this joker in a dozen other films: He's the LEADING ACE of the Germans. He has NO HONOR and KILLS WITHOUT MERCY. His plane is BLACK. He's called the BLACK FALCON. Did I mention the writers were lazy? In all fairness, he's sort of just there as a charachter to hate.

It's the on-ground dramatics that drag the picture down. The love story between Rawlings (James Franco, more famous as Harry Osborn in the Spider-Man films) and a French woman from the countryside isn't particularly good and seems to only have the point of slapping the audience in the face to say "HE'S the main character". While it probably did happen, I feel it wasn't really nessecary. The other side characters do their roles well, with no one standing out in particular. The only character I really remember liking was Beagle, played by David Ellison, for one particular scene at the end. He wasn't GOOD, he just got me to ellicit one chuckle. It's really just acceptable, and a fun way to kill 2 hours. Just make sure to turn off your "Anti-Cliche" gauge, or risk explosive decompression.

OVERALL: 6.0/10.