Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

‘Flyboys’: Ground the romance and go for the dogfights

Those magnificent men in their flying machines are back on the big screen for the first time in decades in “Flyboys,” a flawed, overlong but sporadically engaging paean to the World War I scarf-and-goggles set.

Movie fans have hardly been clamoring for a new Great War aviation movie; the last one I can recall was the 1966 classic “The Blue Max,” with George Peppard and Ursula Andress in her smokin’-hot heyday as the immortal Countess Kaeti von Klugermann.

The film that director Tony Bill, a TV veteran, and a trio of writers have crafted here is probably not going to spark a renaissance of this sub-subgenre. Still, when it takes to the air and the Nieuports and Fokkers swarm like angry bees, it’s easy to see what drew young studs to this newfangled war weapon called the fighter plane.

The film tells of the Lafayette Escadrille, an aviation unit made up of French and British volunteers who were trying to stave off Le Boche in the dark days before the U.S. officially got into the fight. Some 38 young Americans eventually volunteered for the unit, and they are the film’s focus.

World War I was the last conflict in which anyone labored under the delusion that words such as gallantry, nobility and honor could be broadly applied to the act of human beings slaughtering each other on the battlefield, and those were clearly the motivating ideas for some of these flyboys.

Briggs Lowry (Tyler Labine), for example, is reluctantly trying to prove his manhood to his scornful father, while William Jensen (Philip Winchester) is looking to carry on a hopelessly romanticized tradition of his family’s ancestral warrior ethic.

For others, however, it’s not so simple. Blaine Rawlings (James Franco) is searching for meaning in his life after the bank forecloses on his family farm, while black expatriate boxer Eugene Skinner (Abdul Salis), the son of an American slave, wants to give something back to his adopted, racially tolerant country.

Under the command of French Capt. Georges Thenault (the great French actor Jean Reno) and the spooky leadership of the unit’s theretofore only American, enigmatic loner Reed Cassidy (Martin Henderson), they willingly jump into a job in which the average survival rate is measured in weeks.

The press notes insist that “virtually everything” in the film happened in real life, though the pilots are composites and the only historical characters are Thenault and the unit’s mascot, a young, tame lion named Whiskey (who comes off like a goofy 400-pound puppy).

The airborne scenes are giddy, exhilarating fun. Soaring into the clouds in machines that look like they’ll break into pieces any second, packing hammers to beat their jam-prone machine guns into line, armed with pistols to take their own lives should their balky engines burst into flames, these self-styled “knights of the air” truly lived on the edge of a new frontier.

Unfortunately, one wholly fabricated aspect of the film, a romance between Rawlings and a cute French farm girl named Lucienne (Jennifer Decker), is a major drag on the story.

Someone in Hollywood really, really wants to make Franco a leading man, but his acting chops still don’t extend beyond brooding and scowling. Unless you want to count mumbling.

When he’s in the air, that hardly matters. But whenever the movie touches down to give him another tender scene with Decker, viewers are likely to quickly begin counting the minutes until the next dogfight.

Waaaaay too much time is devoted to this subplot, which helps stretch the film to a ridiculous two hours and 20 minutes, grounds the action several times and becomes all the more annoying upon reaching its unsatisfying closing-credits resolution.

In the end, the abundance of thrilling aerial acrobatics in “Flyboys” offsets the many ground-dragging clichés -- but the margin is about as thin as the canvas stretched so tightly across those biplane wings.

2½ stars. Rated PG-13 for violence. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.