| SURPLUS HARDWARE (II) : Rob Cohen's 'Stealth' [5/10] |
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| Tuesday, 02 August 2005 | |
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Though aimed squarely at the adolescent-testosterone market previously tapped by director Cohen with The Fast and the Furious and xXx, the most appreciative audiences for Stealth will perhaps be those of us who named Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America - World Police among our top ten films of 2004. Because Stealth - the far-fetched tale of a hyper-advanced, totally automated war-plane (Firefox meets Blue Thunder) whose operating system develops a 'mind' of its own (Knight Rider's KITT meets 2001's HAL) - is pretty much Team America played with a straight face, and just the hint of a cocky, knowing wink. "War is a team sport!" growls grizzled veteran Cummings (Sam Shepard, in a slumming return to Right Stuff airspace). He's the no-nonsense commanding officer of an super-elite three-strong team of US Navy pilots comprising: a too-cool-for-flying-school superstud who for some reason shares his name with 17th century composer Henry Purcell (a pre-Oscar Jamie Foxx - is this then his Gothika?); blue-eyed, wisecracking Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas) and the shapely Kara Wade (Jessica Biel) - this last pair suppressing their romantic urges for the greater good of the squad. Henry, Ben and Kara aren't best pleased when Cummings reveals the trio is about to become a foursome - and displeasure curdles even further when they discover that the 'newbie' is no less than "the future of digital warfare." This is the 'Extreme Deep Invader' - known (in what is probably not a nod to recent Polish cinema) as 'Edi' - who flies and bombs without the inconvenience of a human presence in the cockpit. Needless to say, the gang's suspicions are rapidly justified when a lightning strike (!) rewrites EDI's circuits in a way that baffles even his egghead inventor Keith Orbit (Richard Roxburgh, wasted). EDI soon turns maverick - he develops (absurdly) a taste for deafening nu-metal, and when Gannon tries to talk him back on side the machine responds with a drawled "leave me alone" reminiscent of Peter Cook's indelible 'Dremble Wedge and the Vegetation' number from Bedazzled. More seriously, EDI starts picking his own hazardous missions - including 'Caviar Sweep', a bombing-raid on Siberia which might well set off World War III... Stealth has been described as 'Top Gun for the post-9/11' era - the opening titles solemnly inform us that the film takes place in a "near future" where "the mounting terrorist threat" requires an ever-more elaborate (and, implicitly, expensive) response from the military-industrial complex. And it's presumably far from accidental that our heroes' base of operations turns out to be, of all places the USS Abraham Lincoln, site of George W Bush's jaw-dropping "mission accomplished" photo opportunity back in May 2003. Despite much (seamless) CGI elsewhere, that's apparently the real USS Abraham Lincoln up there on screen - which means that, presumably, the US Navy weren't too upset about the way their organisation is presented in the script. Richter does seem careful not to 'rock the boat' in that regard - though there does turn out to be one undeniably rotten apple in the Navy barrel, it doesn't take too long before he's identified and removed from the chain of command. Stealth could easily be shown as a recruiting film for the Navy - the success of Gannon, Purcell and Wade indicate that no race is as little of a bar to progress as gender - although it thankfully doesn't go overboard in the flag-waving department. Despite sequences of gut-spinning aeronautical gung-ho blast'em action and scads of hard-bitten jargonese (EDI has a "brain like a quantum sponge") W D Richter's script does at least contain some awareness of the moral dimensions involved. "War is not a video game," exclaims Gannon, "... actions shouldn't be divorced from their consequences" - though all this laudably pinko hand-wringing does sit somewhat uneasily alongside sequences which recall the pounding strains of Parker and Stone's rousingly OTT battle-anthem 'America - F*ck Yeah!' These include a trip to Tajikistan in which a shot of a dusty courtyard containing some evildoers' hardware could have been liften straight from a Team America outtake - the locals don't quite charge around going 'derka-derka! derka-derka!' but neither are they ever presented as anything other than faceless recipients of America's turbo-charged, impeccably-intelligenced uber-justice. The aerial set-pieces are suitably effective on the visceral eye-candy level, including a particularly nifty disastrous ejection/parachute-landing sequence which drops the hapless Wade behind enemy lines - in, of all places, North Korea. This sets up the ludicrous extended finale in which one of Wade's fellow pilots (see if you can guess which) decides to disobey orders and mount an against-all-odds rescue mission with EDI's assistance. Yep, in an extremely abrupt (and credulity-stretching) turnaround triggered by a wayward piece of shrapnel (!), the so-called 'Tin Man' (he always had a brain, now he's growing a 'heart') has gone from Armageddon-triggering machine infernale to a Mach-5 cousin of Brad Bird's tear-jerkingly sympathetic Iron Giant. By this stage Richter (previously responsible for the excellent seventies Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, among other cult favourites) seems to have handed over scriptwriting duties to an electronic autopilot of his own. If only critics and audiences could call upon similar high-tech 'help' when the going gets tough... Neil Young |
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