Silly Stealth Soars as a Guilty Pleasure

I’ll certainly give Rob Cohen’s latest junkie juvenile action extravaganza “Stealth” one thing; it certainly offers one of the best bait and switches I’ve seen in a while. Not that what transpires should really come as a surprise. If you’re even slightly observant and have an ear for dialogue you’ll know where things are going to go long before the characters do. Still, it is a twist with far more flair and imagination than I would have expected from the director of “The Fast and the Furious,” and as such things go I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Don’t take that to mean I’m going to pull my punches. “Stealth” isn’t a very good movie. It’s contrived and silly, moving at warp speed so as to leave novel concepts like character development floating somewhere off in the distance. But you just can’t take something as silly and exuberantly over-the-top like this too seriously. It’s B-grade science fiction after all, made with gusto and glee and those looking to compare it with Shakespeare might as well just head for the exit now.

Combining elements of “Top Gun,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “War Games,” “Firefox,” “The Terminator” and last summer’s “I, Robot,” “Stealth” concerns the activities of three cocky naval aviators participating in a top secret experiment testing the latest in military stealth technology. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. After seemingly completing their training, the team is joined by a fourth pilot, the computerized Extreme Deep Invader nicknamed “EDI.” EDI is the point of the sword in unmanned military aircraft; a thinking computer with the potential to assist the pilots on assignments and take on dangerous maneuvers the human body isn’t capable of completing.

Team leader Lt. Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas) isn’t happy about this turn of events, sure a computer could never comprehend the moral implications of mechanized warfare. His second Lt. Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx) disagrees foreseeing a future where they have all been thankfully replaced by a more accurate and reliable artificial intelligence. Lt. Kara Wade (Jessica Biel) isn’t sure what side of the fence she falls on in this debate. All the lieutenant really knows is that she’s more than content to follow her orders so she can continue flying the most advanced and ultra-sonically fast fighter planes anywhere in the entire world. That’s more than good enough for her.

After completing its first mission with flying colors, EDI is struck by lightning and the plane’s central brain starts adapting in unanticipated ways. Going against orders, the computer decides to go after a top secret target in the center of Russian Siberia taking the numerous war games programmed into it absolutely seriously. With circumstances slowly spiraling out of control and the team members unable to continue, Ben finds he is the only one capable of stopping EDI before he instigates World War III. What the team leader doesn’t know is that the real threat might not be the renegade drone but something even more insidious, hiding behind the rank of a superior officer and secretly plotting both his and EDI’s immediate demise.

“Stealth” isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the woodshed. I’m not sure how smart it is to have a character bark out around the middle how the last thing anyone needs is for war to become a mindless video game, all the while the picture itself moves, acts and looks just like the latest title to hit the X-Box. I also can’t help but ask that films about computer geniuses stop using Seattle as a punching bag. Yes, I know we have Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And yes, I realize that even after the tech bust we still have out fair share billionaire geeks. But come on now, a joke is a joke and this one’s getting a little old.

In all seriousness, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” scribe W.D. Richter’s screenplay is a gloriously silly concoction filled with so many twists and turns and leftfield plot developments Cohen can’t help but lose a handle on some of them. There’s enough going on here for a half dozen pictures, “Stealth” so stuffed to the gills I kept waiting for it to explode. And yet, there is something exuberantly giddy about the whole thing, something so startlingly intoxicating I’m not sure whether to smile or hang my head in shame for saying so. Let’s just say about the time Ben starts treating EDI like HAL 9000 and Kara finds herself trudging through the Korean wilderness like a distaff James Bond we’d entered territory completely off the normal Hollywood roadmap. It’s a mess. A big, sloppy, loud, syrupy surreal mess, and lord help me if I started to eat it up.

Don’t let the cleverly designed ads fool you, though. There is a reason recent Oscar-winner Foxx comes up billed third. And while he is a jovial narcissistic self-involved dynamo that’s pure pleasure to watch, don’t expect him to hang around all that long. Too bad, because for all their movie star good looks and brilliant pearl-white smiles both Lucas and Biel are little more than wet noodles when compared to their costar’s four course dinner. Neither gets the film’s tone or vibe, both playing things so close to the vest you’d think the two of them thought they were making “War and Peace.”

There’s one property Cohen would never touch and thank goodness for that. The majority of his movies are so frantic and overly melodramatic the idea of him taking on something of such weighty complexity is almost laughable. Yet, working with Richter is good for the filmmaker. Sure he’s still too obsessed with firing automatic weapons and blowing things up (both of which happen far too much here), but for once the director actually feels a need to step off the accelerator and let some of the writer’s more interesting ideas take flight. So, okay, I admit freely said ideas are nothing more than warmed-over Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark afterthoughts, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting.

Still, while I am more than willing to admit “Stealth” surprised me I’m not about to say it’s anything more than a slightly above-average guilty pleasure. The CGI effects are omnipresent and sometimes laughable, while more than a few of the action scenes are edited so exhaustively you’re think it was Michael Bay and not Rob Cohen holding the reigns. Worse, wonderful character actors Sam Shepard, Joe Morton and Richard Roxburgh are completely wasted in roles so cliché it’s virtually criminal.

Be that as it may, there is fun to be had here if you’re in the right mindset. I may not have loved “Stealth” but I certainly did smile from time to time. It sounds like a small thing, but in a summer filled to the brim with unending disappointment a smile just might be the most welcome surprise of them all.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)