Flight of the Phoenix
Review by Jason Gaston
After being unceremoniously fired, an
oil rig crew in the Gobi desert are flying home when a sandstorm
causes their plane to crash. Now, low on water and in the middle of
the most unforgivable wasteland in the world... where even going out
to take a pee-pee means certain death, the survivors hit on a
brilliantly crazy plan: Let's build a new plane out of the old one and
fly away to safety!
Flight
of the Phoenix is a mostly harmless and mostly pointless
remake of the 1965 Jimmy Stewart movie, The Flight of the Phoenix.
There's a "the" separating the two movies... sort of like Batman and
The Batman... sometimes the "the" makes all the difference between a
superior and inferior product.
Flight of the Phoenix (without the "the") stars Dennis Quaid as
the pilot of the crashed airplane and Giovanni Ribisi as a smartassed
smarmy engineer who makes the plans to make a new airplane out of the
old. Quaid does a pretty good job in this movie even though he may
have gone a little overboard with the machoness, but Ribisi almost
looks horrified that he's in this movie... to the point where he
sounds like he's making fun of his own lines... and that accent? Wuff!
To his credit, though, John Moore's style seems to have mellowed since
his horrible directorial debut in Behind Enemy Lines. Here, he is more
subdued and more controlled, even though he does lapse into visionary
idiocy every now and again. Now, I'm not sure how much of a compliment
that me saying "this movie looks better than Behind Enemy Lines"
is, but it's a compliment none the less, so take it how you will.
For a matinee movie, Flight of the Phoenix is a pretty decent
ride and, if you haven't seen the original I suppose it will be
entertaining enough. Still, I can't shake just what a pointless remake
this was. I have no problem with remakes, but if you're not going to
at least try to surpass or give a different take on the source
material, why bother in the first place?
The ending is something you see coming from a mile away and is every
bit as abrupt as it is predictable... but there is a minor amount of
fun to be had in this mess of a movie.
Just a minor amount.