Stealth will no doubt delight action fans.
It has the swagger of Top Gun distilled through the insanity of Team America: World Police.
But the rest of the audience might recoil in confusion, or at least be stupefied by the banality of the story. There is little to recommend beyond the action sequences, unless you like your arrogant-America, flag-waving jingoism taken to extreme lengths.
The heroes are three cowboy-style U.S. Navy pilots operating in high-tech machines in the near future. One is the hotshot (Josh Lucas). One is the hot chick (Jessica Biel). One is the cool customer (Jamie Foxx in his disappointing first release since an historic best actor Oscar win for Ray).
Lucas, Biel and Foxx are good enough to set themselves up as archetypes, but the script by W.D. Richter and the cut-to-the-chase direction by Rob Cohen means they can never go beyond that surface noise to give their characters depth.
What they do have is a situation. Flying off an aircraft carrier, the three pilots fight world terrorists under the tutelage of a savvy military commander (playwright-actor Sam Shepard, slumming in a role beneath his skill set).
These guys -- and one gal -- get the dirty job, which is killing nasty foreigners, done by any means necessary. In the early going of the movie, that means targeting known terrorists congregating in South Asia. In the second act, that means shooting up friendly Russian warplanes who "misunderstand" a renegade invasion by the Americans. Collateral damage such as the killing of civilians or the spreading of nuclear fallout across a pristine mountain environment is just the cost of being the world police.
The trouble factor here is a computer-run, pilotless warplane that is introduced by Shepard as the fourth wingman to his elite crew of three. They don't like "him" on instinct. They like it even less when lightning fries the future shock plane's computer and it becomes the enemy within.
The safety of America, if not the world, is in jeopardy. The crisis is that large, that overblown.
Stealth quickly becomes an airborne action picture with tangents, such as the military squabbles on board the aircraft carrier, or the undeveloped romantic frisson between Lucas and Biel or the life-and-death struggle that one of our heroes endures after a crash landing in North Korea, where all Americans are the enemy.
The aerial dogfights are impressive. While obviously staged with a maximum of digital effects, it takes a minimum of effort to lose yourself in them and believe they are real.
The hand-to-hand combat in North Korea is less believable, unless you accept that the enemy can never shoot straight when there is an American hero who has to survive in the middle of a firefight.
As for the computerized plane, think of it as a poor third cousin to Hal, the errant computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. While they share a certain disembodied vocal quality and refuse to do the bidding of their supposed masters, the comparisons end there.
Hal would kick the pilotless plane in Stealth all the way to the Milky Way and back. Stealth has the flash but movies such as 2001 have the substance in the sci-fi action genre.
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