Really bad film...

[D-Day_Dodger]

Yep, I watched "Flyboys" and all I have to say is that it's musical equivalent would be classed as elevator music. This is a formula movie from beginning to end. It reminded me of "Pearl Harbor", some exciting CGI enhanced sequences sandwiched between pure schlock. It also seems that the current Hollywood format requires all big budget films to have a "chick flick" aspect to them to maximize the audience appeal. This one doesn't disappoint in that respect as one of our heroes gives his French girl friend joyrides and rescues her in his plane in the middle of the night.
My favourite piece of stupidity is when one of our Flyboys crashes his plane in No Man's Land and another of his buddies lands between the two lines to rescue him. Even the director of the movie realized the impossibility of a plane landing in the crater pocked hell of No Man's Land, so he just skips the landing part, and we see only the pilot climbing out of his plane.

I haven't laughed so hard since I saw the scene in "Memphis Belle" where the bombadier of the Memphis Belle, which is the lead bomber in a huge formation of B-17's, tells his pilot that their target is partially obscured by clouds and that there is a risk they might hit a hospital which is adjacent to the target. So the pilot decides that he must go around again for another approach, which he does and presumably the hundreds of other B-17's in the bomber stream which stretches back hundreds of miles, follow suit. Can you imagine the chaos such a manuver would create?

Oh, and back to our hero rescuing our other hero in No Man's Land. One guy's hand is pinned under his plane so his buddy convieniently finds a shovel nearby and hacks the guys hand off. Anyhow, later in the movie this dude returns with his new hand, I mean hook, and resumes his flying career. Now I can buy that, I guess, but the hook sticks out so much further than his real hand that it is obvious it was stuck over top of his supposedly missing hand (Dear Director, if you can't do it right, don't do it at all).

It's a shame that the good production values and graphics were wasted on producing a comic strip intead of a novel. The Blue Max with George Peppard is still an infinitely better movie.