Stealth

It’s common knowledge that the U.S Navy utilises computer artificial intelligence in order to operate sophisticated military hardware. It’s also common knowledge that a high percentage of Hollywood studio action films are so intensely excretal, they could give an audience eye cancer. Stepping up to the plate is Stealth, the latest offering from action director Rob Cohen (XXX, Fast and the Furious). So powerfully lacking in any intelligence or purpose, Stealth makes Gigli look like Citizen Kane.

Taking the notion of computer controlled weaponry and applying it to a state-of-the-art fighter jet, Stealth begins with the first of a baffling array of dizzying dogfight sequences. It’s during this CGI onslaught that we are introduced to the three leads; hunky-maverick-pilot-who-does-things-his-own-way Lt. Ben Gannon (Lucas), the impossibly-sexy-yet-intelligent-enough-to-fly-a-jet Kara Wade (Biel) and stereotypical-token-black-guy Henry Purcell (Foxx).

The film begins with an opening crawl which educates the viewer on the scant premise: that the U.S Navy has created an elite division of test pilots who fly highly classified fighter jets known as ‘Talons’. Specifically designed for counter-terrorism, the elite pilots fly their fighters to any destination on the planet and eliminate targets that are considered a threat. Upon returning from training, commanding officer Captain George Cummings (Shepard) introduces the team to their ‘fourth wingman’, an artificial intelligence based unmanned fighter called EDI. Initially wary of the computer controlled aircraft, the team are soon impressed with EDI and its capabilities in the field. Unfortunately, when returning to base after a mission, EDI is struck by lightning and its circuitry is rewired. EDI begins to develop a mind of its own; disobeying orders in the field and making its own judgement calls. It decides to carry out a mission of its own devising, a mission that could result in WWIII.

Essentially 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Top Gun; Stealth is so mind blowing in its unoriginality, it’s difficult to fathom how such an unmitigated turd of a script was green lit in the first place. Director Rob Cohen has fashioned the emptiest, dullest, most tedious and laughable action film yet committed to celluloid. Cohen’s previous excursions into empty spectacle: XXX and The Fast and the Furious are cinematic masterpieces in comparison to the atrocity that is Stealth. Apparently obsessed with ‘detail’ and ‘originality’ Cohen demanded that the computer effects be the most convincing and realistic yet attempted (considering the gargantuan $100 million + budget one would think that this aspect of the film would at least be of merit) but the effects in Stealth are as limp and unrealistic as its premise. The utterly wasted cast struggle with the (for lack of a better word) script; (penned by Buckaroo Banzai Writer/Director: W.D. Richter) which is a bland, nonsensical mishmash of cliché’s and half-assed plagiarism. EDI’s monotone voice mimics HAL 9000’s but instead sounds suspiciously like K.I.T.T from Knight Rider and a mission to Myanmar (formerly Burma) has the team bomb a target in Rangoon which is actually now called Yangon. But Stealth doesn’t care; it revels in such inaccuracies as it blunders along like a live action version of Team America: World Police (perhaps the addition of the Team America theme song: ‘America, F**k Yeah!’ would’ve been beneficial to the proceedings).

Cohen’s unabashed commerciality has EDI in one scene inexplicably downloading songs from the internet (“all of them” as its maintenance boffin says) and playing them at top volume during key action sequences.
Quite why a sophisticated computer wants to listen to rock music is never explained nor is, given the millions of songs that EDI has downloaded, why it only plays those by (Stealth soundtrack contributors) Incubus.
So, if your definition of a great film is ‘Jessica Biel in a tiny bikini & lots of shit blowing up’ then Stealth is the summer blockbuster for you; but if you like to leave a cinema with your dignity and sense of human decency intact then maybe you should just keep moving because there’s absolutely, positively, nothing to see here.

JARROD WALKER