PLOT: In World War I, before the U.S. entered the war, a handful of young American volunteers donned French uniforms and formed a flying ace squadron called the Lafayette Escadrille. This is their story.
It's only fair that Flyboys, the flashy World War I dogfight film from Independence Day producer Dean Devlin, should steal liberally from Star Wars -- up to and including a black-clad "bad German" who has his own Darth Vader music.
After all, filmies accuse George Lucas of having stolen his X-wing battles from the WWI classic Wings, meaning the Hollywood snake took only 75 years to eat its own tail here.
But Lucas was smart enough not to make Star Wars nearly two-and-a-half-hours long, devoting two-thirds of the film to the romance between Luke and Leia.
Not so Flyboys, which has a good 30-45 minutes of jaw-dropping albeit less-than-realistic aeronautics (if some 'Net "experts" are to be believed, the real planes would have fallen apart under the stress of these CGI stunts).
It then pads the rest with everything it can think of, providing back stories for a gang of mostly doomed flyboys who are such old war movie cliches, it's amazing one of them isn't a kid named Brooklyn.
There's the Bible-thumping kid (Michael Jibson), the square-jawed kid from a military family who's paralyzed by fear (Philip Winchester), the kid who can't shoot straight (David Ellison), the arrogant milk-fed rich kid (Tyler Labine), and the black kid (Abdul Salis) who adopts France over his racist home country.
And then there's Blaine Rawlings (James Franco), a bitter cowboy, one step ahead of the law after the bank foreclosed on his family's ranch.
Like his pals, he's there to put on a French uniform and join the all-American flying ace squadron Lafayette Escadrille (a real-life group of volunteers who did their fighting before the U.S. entered the war in 1917).
And of course, he's there to make time with les jeunes filles, specifically one named Lucienne (Jennifer Decker). Flyboys spends an awfully long time with his little unscheduled flights to her farm where she raises her orphaned nephews -- the better to showcase the cutesy/clunky I-don't-speak-your-language romantic dialogue, which mainly consists of the words "I," "you" and "we" and various hand motions.
Meanwhile back at the base, Rawlings infuriates his French commander (go-to Hollywood Frenchman Jean Reno) and continuously runs afoul of Reed Cassidy (Bruce Boxleitner clone Martin Henderson), a bitter veteran consumed by his vendetta against Darth Vader, um I mean The Black Falcon (Gunnar Winbergh).
Theatres are the better way in so many ways, but unfortunately you can't fast-forward from dogfight to dogfight in them.
BOTTOM LINE: Hollywood thievery comes full circle as a WWI film steals Star Wars dogfight action and motifs (including a Darth Vader theme song for the "bad German," the Black Falcon), just as George Lucas stole from the WWI classic Wings. But thrilling in the air as it is, it's a cliched old war movie on the ground, with a groaner I-can't-speak-your-language romance and every stereotype short of a kid named "Brooklyn."
(This film is rated PG)
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