Steven Seagal must retrieve or destroy a stolen stealth bomber
before terrorists use it to deliver a biological bomb.
The film begins with the plus-sized paladin about to have his
memory erased by some kind of doctor in some kind of military jail. He escapes
with the help of two confederates who have no other function in the plot. Once
he escapes, he thwarts a convenience store robbery by killing all the baddies -
but not before they panic and shoot all the store clerks. What was he doing in
the convenience store? Tracking down baddies for the government? Nah. He just
happened to be shopping there when the robbery began, so he took it upon himself
to do some killin'. If there's one thing that gets the man upset, it's when somebody
interrupts his snack selection.
What does all of that have to do with a stealth bomber?
Absolutely nothing. It's about 30 minutes of prologue designed to get Segal into
the hands of the general with the missing plane. You see, the local police
investigate the robbery and decide that they better call the feds because the
full-figured fighter is just more than they can handle. The feds, in turn, call
military intelligence. Blah, blah. I would not be at all surprised to find out
that the prologue was something left over from a different movie.
Once the general manages to coerce Seagal into the actual mission,
the narrative consists almost entirely of
four elements:
1) stock flying footage and stock explosion footage purchased
from other productions
2) the faces of pilots in cockpits
3) shots of computer screens showing random things "locking
on" to other random things
4) shots of command headquarters back in the States, where the
military brass deliver expository dialogue so we can understand what the hell is
going on with Segal's mission, which would be otherwise incomprehensible.
"How's
he doing, Commodore?"
"Sir, the Seal team assigned to back him up has failed to
make the rendezvous, and has experienced an 100% casualty rate."
"Then, God help
him, he'll have to do it alone."
"But, sir, it's only one man against an Army,
and he only has three hours left to (describes complete mission in detail). We
better carpet-bomb the area."
"Dammit, Commodore, this is no ordinary
man. This is my best multi-chinned pilot."
Back in 2003, when he was really overweight and out of shape,
Seagal made two
incredibly bad films back-to-back with
director Michael Oblowitz. After that he worked out a bit, dropped enough weight
to do his own
fights again, wrote some of his own script treatments and experienced a period
of resurgence. Sadly, that period seems to have ended. The big-boned battler has
once again churned out back-to-back
disasters with a director named Michael:
|
Michael Oblowitz |
Michael Keusch |
|
The Foreigner ... 2.54 |
Attack Force ... 2.72 |
|
Out For a Kill ... 2.74 |
Flight of Fury ... 3.42 |
The IMDb scores in the table above suggest that Flight of Fury
isn't as bad as the other three films, but this film's score has been
inexplicably polluted by a rash of perfect scores. That's obviously
ballot-stuffing. The top 1000 voters at IMDb rate Flight of Fury 2.4, exactly
the same score they give to Attack Force. I agree. The film has absolutely no positives and a myriad
of negatives:
-
There's very little hand-to-hand combat in Flight of Fury, and none of it
is very good. What little there is generally pictures Seagal in head-and-shoulders shots or using an obvious double.
Instead of prolonged fights, he tends to knife opponents quickly, and fast editing disguises his girth.
-
The performances are
uniformly sub-par. Seagal's own acting now consists entirely of his controlled
tough-guy whisper.
-
The film was lensed in Romania, but the story is set in
Afghanistan, so all of the extras are Eastern European guys in Afghani mufti,
with their faces covered most of the time, presumably to disguise their
features.
-
There is no
detail in the characterization, and very little in the dialogue.
-
The flying action uses stock footage, as described above. The
non-flying action consists entirely of clichés, and the best of that is also
stock footage lifted from 1986's
Iron Eagle.
-
There's almost no plot detail other than the rough outline I
described above, and what little detail there is makes very little sense,
perhaps because it was cobbled around existing footage.
-
To top it all off, the cobbled-in plot isn't even original!
The storyline of this film is taken directly from another straight-to-vid film
called Black Thunder, which came out in 1998. According to
IMDb, Flight of Fury it was even called Black Thunder as a working title.
Here's the summary for 1998's
Black Thunder:
When the top secret prototype of the Nova Stealth fighter has
been stolen, the Pentagon launches a big alarm; the plane shouldn't come into
hostile hands. There is only one man who can get the plane back: test pilot
Vince Conners. He and his partner Jannick pursue the Nova to Libya but when they
land at the site their mission fails. Jannick has been captured and Conners is
on the run. Without friends or allies they have to try to find the Nova before
they fall into the hands of the military regime and before terrorists can use
the plane to bomb a United Nations meeting with nerve gas.
Not only is the plot of Flight of Fury virtually identical,
but our portly pilot also has a partner named Jannick - and other character names are
also the same as in Black Thunder!
In other words, Flight of Fury consists of footage from one
old film, and a plot from another.
A straightforward
remake of a recent grade-B Michael Dudikoff movie?
Not even bothering to change the characters' names?
Frankly, it's like the weighty warrior isn't even trying any
more.
