MICKEYMOUSE wrote:But I am suprized Sealth is there just because Jamie Foxx is in that movie.
It was nothing against Jamie Foxx, personally, but... that's a really stupid arguement against my having it on the list. Why, by all accounts I could say that Made In America was a great movie and/or wasn't the least bit farfetched just because Whoopi Goldberg was in it. When someone gets to say "it was great because (so-and-so) was in it", we have critical anarchy (
).
DisneyFan 2000 wrote:Crash, in my opinion, is a piece of mainstream junk.
And preachy, and heavy-handed, and...
Madagascar : I know that a lot of people liked Shrek. And they're as happy as a pig in s*** that there are a dozen movies coming out that are just like it. But that trend is unoriginal to begin with. You can't just say it's great because it's family-friendly and all "nice" with a poppy music soundtrack and celebrity voices. Sorry to burst all your bubbles. Films DO suffer as a result of their absurd characters, half-filled senses of humor (how quickly everyone forgets the Dr. Dolittle movies!). And hey- who am I arguing with here? This is Dreamworks ripping off Disney's legacy with Shrek and all it's followers, and poorly at that. Try again.
Stealth : "'Stealth' is an offense against taste, intelligence and the noise pollution code -- a dumbed-down "Top Gun" crossed with the HAL 9000 plot from "2001." It might be of interest to you if you want to see lots of jet airplanes going real fast and making a lot of noise, and if you don't care that the story doesn't merely defy logic, but strips logic bare, cremates it and scatters its ashes." - Roger Ebert.
"Aiming to join the Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay school of American movie war games, "Stealth" is just too dumb to make the grade. Director Rob Cohen's fifth high-speed production with producer Neal H. Moritz ("XXX," "The Fast and the Furious") turns near-future Air Force jets guided by artificial intelligence into objects for thrill rides and nearly erotic pleasure while warning of a corrupt Pentagon at the core. "Stealth" probably won't stay airborne for too long." - Robert Koehler, Variety
"'Stealth' has got the right stuff -- guns, guts and good looks. But instead of flying high, it sputters to get off the ground. The only highlight is a backstabbing computer named Eddie." - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
"Probably pitched as Top Gun meets Terminator, Stealth is more along the slapdash lines of Iron Eagle II meets Short Circuit. Its action sequences, more geeky than thrilling, fail to rescue the laughable plot. But like Top Gun, this gas-guzzling gearhead trip from director Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) was made with the support of the real-life U.S. Navy—although only assiduous credit hounds would notice. Along with the other armed forces branches, the navy allows access to bases, equipment, and personnel for select projects after approving scripts to make sure they present an "accurate" depiction of service life; such joint efforts, the thinking goes, can enhance the military's public image and aid recruitment efforts." - Ed Halter, The Village Voice
"Keep 'Stealth' off your radar: there's plenty of computer-generated action but little in the way of plot or suspense. The funniest scene I've seen this year takes place about midway through the futuristic jet fighter flick Stealth. Supermodel-gorgeous Jessica Biel, playing - oh man, I'm starting to giggle again - one of the world's most elite jet pilots, ejects from her malfunctioning jet. Even though the jet has been malfunctioning for some time, Biel's Lt. Kara Wade waits until the last possible second to eject. And even though her jet appears to have every single piece of information on Earth at her fingertips - it's the Web times 50 - she doesn't happen to notice that she's ejecting over, whoops, North Korea. Then it gets better. Biel recites a progressively more hilarious play-by-play of her descent, which breaks about 72 laws of physics: She ends up beneath the exploding plane, which would have been miles away in seconds. She's getting smacked around by chunks of plane. And burning debris is raining down on her chute. If it doesn't sound hilarious, I guess I just don't have the touch of Stealth director Rob Cohen, who remarkably graduated from Harvard before helming such inane pap as The Fast and the Furious and XXX. Stealth - man, does that title not fit - is a headache-inducing, bombastic, utterly soul-crushing mess. It looks pretty, sure, with all its computer-generated bells and whistles, and its way-too-pretty cast. Grade: D" - Rick Gershman, St. Petersburg Times
"The twitchy tweener next to me offered running commentary along the lines of "awesome!!!" and "kickass!!!", but Cohen's film, despite its video-game, user-friendly toggles – clearly marked "Adrenaline" and "More Adrenaline" – plays like a slapdash assemblage of the greatest hits of conspiracy-minded action cinema. Stealth also mines everything from John Badham's 1983 renegade chopper opus Blue Thunder to, uh, John Badham's 1983 renegade computer opus WarGames, and, just for laffs, John Badham’s 1986 war-bot comedy Short Circuit. Sadly, the humor here is apparently unintentional and Ally Sheedy is nowhere to be found, but tonal quibbles such as these pale when confronted by the sheer Richter-trembling magnitude of Cohen’s bravura use of CGI and a 100-ton gimbal. The script, from sometime genre favorite W.D. Richter, is a hamfisted collection of cornball military clichés that frequently cross over into Absurdistan airspace before vectoring back toward the friendly skies of sci-fi, but even that fails to put much of a dent in the mental-whiplash-inducing forward motion of this two-hours-plus film. It's Hollywood hokum in extremis, and while the Gannon/Wade romantic-competition subplot threatens to ground the film every quarter-hour or so, Cohen’s mastery of the big-budget aerial action sequences repeatedly acts as a epinephrine jab to the heart of what might have otherwise been a high flying DOA." - Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle
"Given a better script, I probably would've loved Stealth, but it's more like a high school linebacker trying to take the SAT after an all-night kegger. Stay far, far away from Stealth, unless of course you yourself are a high school linebacker finding your way to your DVD player after an all-night kegger. Sometime in the near future, likely after Dubya declares the U.S. a military state and himself our Emperor, the U.S. steps up its fight against terrorism by building a fleet of three stealth fighters and training three exceptional pilots to destroy whatever's necessary to stop these threats. Does my insurance cover brain damage? In my history with DVD Verdict, I've reviewed Airheads, Encino Man, and Cabin Boy. These movies were supposed to be stupid—that was the point. I've also reviewed Dragonfly, Georgia, and Valentine. These movies weren't supposed to be stupid—it was just a side effect of lousy writing mixed with over-earnest filmmaking. And then there's Stealth. It definitely falls into the latter category. Its script isn't just stupid; it assumes that you are too. Not only that, it takes it all far too seriously, as if it buys into the ridiculousness of the yarn it spins. Let's break it down, shall we?
Okay, first off, we're asked to believe that jet fighters are the best way to fight terrorists. Never mind that jet fighters are best at blowing things up en masse, and terrorists are best at not congregating en masse. Then we're asked to believe that these "stealth" fighters are really, really loud and fly around with their afterburners on all the time. The whole point of a stealth aircraft is that it's quiet and creates a low profile—like not giving off a constant heat signature, like spewing burning jet fuel behind your aircraft would produce. And speaking of jet fuel, burning your afterburner uses a lot of fuel, yet these jets only need to refuel when it's convenient to the story. They're kinda like the six-shooters in the old westerns that could get off about two dozen shots before reloading…which only needed to be done when the hero absolutely needed to shoot the bad guy. These jets would do Bert Rutan proud—they can fly nearly around the world on a single tank of gas. If you tally up all the miles these planes put in, Kara would've had to have flown about 12,000 miles on a single tank of gas to crash-land in North Korea. Tin Man's journey is even more improbable. Sure, he gets to refuel, but you still gotta consider that he flies across Russia, over the pole to Alaska, then from Alaska to North Korea. I don't even want to do the numbers on that jump. Even worse than the logical inconsistencies and outright abandonment of real-world geography are the movie's attempts to be smarter than it is. Each of the pilots is given the chance to wax philosophical about the nature of war, about good people doing bad things to achieve good ends, that sort of thing. It's just filler, something to pass the time and use less budget than flying and blowing shit up. They're about as convincing as arguments in a high school civics class, and about as successful at making the movie look smart as putting glasses on a dog. Groucho glasses." - Mike Jackson, DVDverdict.com
"Cohen seems assured with action and effects sequences but when he tries for drama is a director who only reaches for clichés that more often than not collapse into the laughable. And expectedly Stealth is no more than an assemblage of clichés taken from other films." - Richard Scheib, Sci-Fi / Horror & Fantasy Film Review
"Rob Cohen, he of The Fast and the Furious and xXx infamy, is an engineer of dim-witted, belligerent, testosterone-fueled summer spectacles. His latest, Stealth, doesn't stray from this tried-and-true juvenilely aggro blueprint, and its story— reflects Cohen's own aesthetic modus operandi of replacing all traces of humanity with digitized artificiality. The director's fixation on CG-sculpted aerial dogfights and wholesale disinterest in character, plotting, or conversations which last longer than two snappy quips are the driving forces behind this melding of 2001 and Iron Eagle, in which ultra-cocky Naval flyboys must deal with the thinking, learning, emotional EDI once it's hit by lightening and, à la Short Circuit, develops an unpredictable, independent mind of its own." - Nick Shager, Slant Magazine
