Firefox
|
List Price: Our Price: $6.99 You Save: $2.99 (30%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.49 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Canada
Movie Reviews of Firefox
Movie Review: Clint Eastwood the Spy
Summary: 3 Stars
Clint Eastwood has starred in a variety of roles over his career. The character we are most familiar with is macho and self-assured. Occasionally Clint has taken on unusual roles, such as disc jockey, singer and photographer. While this movie would appear to be made for a typical Clint Eastwood role, the conflicted character with mental problems that Clint plays is one of his most unusual roles; a role that Clint struggles to pull off.
Clint plays Mitchell Gant, an Air Force pilot who suffered a terrible experience in Viet Nam after his capture by the North Vietnamese. Visions of that incident continue to haunt Mitchell whenever he is in highly stressful situations. Mitchell is also the best pilot in the world, and is extremely familiar with Soviet military aircraft and tactics. Thus, he is a potentially ideal choice to travel to the Soviet Union and steal the super secret Mig-31, also known as Firefox.
Mitchell is enticed into taking on this mission by a combination of appealing to his abilities and suggesting that the land he is living on might be made available to him permanently. Mitchell is quickly placed into training for the mission. For the next hour and a half you get the impression that Mitchell is not in control of his life, either physically or mentally. Physically he barely understands what is happening around him as people move him from one place to another. Mentally he continues to have flashbacks and fugues that distract him.
The best part of the movie begins with Mitchell's entry onto the Soviet base where the only two prototype Mig-31's exist. Clint Eastwood finally gets to play the macho character for which he is known, with the exception of one lapse in the shower. The best scene in the movie, in my opinion, is when Mitchell steals the Mig-31 from its hangar. I have never seen anyone start a military aircraft as quickly as Mitchell starts the Mig-31.
The final portion of the movie is a cat and mouse game between Mitchell and the Air Force and Navy of the Soviet Union. Mitchell does his best to trick the Soviets into thinking he is going somewhere other than his intended destination. He must also use his limited fuel to reach a refueling station. Otherwise he will run out of fuel and crash into the sea. To add some spice to the movie is the second Firefox prototype, which is quickly loaded with weapons and sent to chase Mitchell down.
This movie suffers from a number of problems. The most significant problem is that the flashbacks Mitchell has are more distracting than illuminating, and quickly become annoying. The flashbacks added little to the plot and just as little to our understanding of Clint's character.
Another, nearly as serious, problem is the stock footage of aircraft used early in the movie. We see an aircraft mysteriously change between an F-5, an F-4 Phantom and an F-105 Thunderchief (I think those were the transitions). Though such transitions are common on television shows, a military advisor should have been available to correct this basic error for a movie.
Another problem is the dated special effects. The Firefox mockup is reasonably good, but once the Firefox is in flight it generally lacks reality. This movie was made in 1982, after the incredible special effects developed for a famous series of science fantasy movies, and better special effects were possible.
Another problem with this movie is the pacing. For most of the first three-fourths of the movie the movie just plods along, with only brief moments of action.
Strangely, with as many problems as this movie has, I like it. It has enough entertainment value that I keep watching it. However, I struggle recommending this movie to anyone but a hardcore Clint Eastwood fan or someone who likes cold war spy movies, even mediocre ones.
Movie Review: An adequate, unusual techno-thriller from Clint Eastwood
Summary: 3 Stars
This was Clint Eastwood's second dip into the waters of the espionage thriller (the first was the awful "Eiger Sanction" back in 1975), and one of the few films he directed which relies heavily on visual effects. As a director, Eastwood seems uneasy with both modes, which go against the grain of his realistic, tough, and often stoic & silent directorial style. Nonetheless, "Firefox" works better than it should. Eastwood brings understated realism to what might have been a hopelessly hokey Cold War techno thriller, and the visual effects-laden last third is fairly exciting. However, the mixture of elements ultimately produces only an adequate film, a strange entry in Eastwood's long string of hits.The plot is a Tom Clancy story before there were Tom Clancy stories (this is based on a novel by Craig Thomas). The Soviets (remember them?) have developed a super fighter jet, the Firefox, with thought-controlled weapons system. The Firefox threatens the balance of power in the Cold War, so NATO needs to get their hands on it, pronto. The only man who can do it is pilot Mitchell Gant (Eastwood). He speaks fluent Russian, can infiltrate the base with the help of Russian Jewish dissenters (played by Ronald Lacey, Nigel Hawthorne, and Warren Clarke), and has the skill to fly the Firefox. Only problem: Gant is highly unstable from his Vietnam experience, is prone is nasty flashbacks (a problem if you're flying a though- controlled plane!), and has done no undercover work before.
"Firefox" is overlong at 136 minutes, and tends to drag with far too many scenes of Russian and NATO boardroom arguments. The film works best in the early parts during the scenes with Lacey, Hawthorne, and Clarke, who all give fine, sentimental performances as double agents who know they are doomed but struggle on for what they know is right. In a few place, Eastwood shows traces of the later themes of the consequences of violence that would mature in "Unforgiven" and "Mystic River." Eastwood himself is fairly good in the role, avoiding any "Dirty Harry" clichés or relying too much on his tough guy image, but he does look rather silly in his undercover disguise scenes.
Nonetheless, it does seem to take forever until the last third, where the Firefox tries to blaze an almost hopeless escape trail out of the Soviet Union, with another Firefox prototype on its tail. The effects (by John Dysktra of "Star Wars" fame) are zippy and fantastic, but any human element left in the film pretty much bails out at this point. Enjoy the planes, enjoy the speed, enjoy Clint just staring out the window and not moving much. It's fairly exciting, but when it's all over, you'll feel a bit let down.
The DVD, like most Warner Bros. discs in the Clint Eastwood Collection, looks very good, and the sound is 5.1. But also like most Warner Bros. discs in the Clint Eastwood Collection, there are no extras.
Movie Review: Entertaining Cold War propaganda
Summary: 3 Stars
Back in the 1980s, Americans couldn't care less about bearded Islamic militants in the backwoods of Afghanistan. Our big concern was the big, bad Soviet Union. Even though we were the most powerful country in the world by a large margin, we feared war and invasion (World War III, Red Dawn, Amerika), espionage (virtually every Bond film from the period), and annhiliation (The Day After, WarGames) at the hands of the U.S.S.R.Firefox fits neatly into this us-versus-them thriller, with iconic American loner/tough-guy hero Clint Eastwood penetrating into the Soviet Union to steal the world's most advanced aircraft, which was invisible to radar and America's defenses. The movie had the potential to be a spectacular spy/action thriller, but the results are something of a mixed bag.
When I watched this film as a child, I was impressed by the seeming omnipresence of the KGB. It was creepy to think that people lived in a society where no one trusted anyone and any loose words could mean certain death. In retrospect, the portrayal of the KGB is somewhat cartoonish. Perhaps most laughable was when Eastwood was asked for "your papers, please" while taking a shower.
Another aspect of the film that seems somewhat dated is the highly propogandistic way in which the dissidents were portrayed. Several of Eastwood's helpers in the Soviet Union risked death by transporting him or giving him secret information, yet they seemed flippant, almost casual about their impending doom, as if being found out and killed by the KGB was just a normal, expected part of the plans. "Oh, don't worry about me," they would say in a dismissive tone, explaining that without the freedoms that Eastwood took for granted back in the West, life just wasn't worth living. While history is full of people giving their lives for freedom, the shallow way in which these characters faced their fates could be chalked up to either poor scriptwriting, shallow Cold War propaganda, or a bit of both.
A couple other criticisms. The dialogue is rather flat and the storyline is somewhat predictable. Eastwood's character remains elusive (one-dimensional?) and stoic (wooden?) throughout the movie. I don't want to criticize the special effects for the flying scenes, though, because they were considered top-notch at the time. Publicity made much of the Star Wars legacy of some of the special effects personnel.
In the end, what we have is something of a cartoonish spy-thriller that entrances starry-eyed children into the epic struggle between East and West, but feels more like a Cold War cops-and-robbers flick for more mature audiences.
Movie Review: A Rather So-So Flick - Sort of "Stereotyped"
Summary: 3 Stars
Although the idea of the novel, and later the movie, came from an actual event that occurred in 1976 when Lt. Viktor Belenko defected from a base in the Soviet Far East to Japan in a, then, secret MiG-25 Foxbat (I read a book about it called "MiG Pilot" written by John Baron), one would have to guess that the name "Firefox" came from the name "Foxbat".
There was plenty of good action with some humor in it, but I find some portions of the film unrealistic. Though I have never been to Russia or back when it was called the "Soviet Union", I could tell that there was so much stereotyping of Russian officials where one would constantly "ask for papers" and it seems that everyone would get asked for papers by some KGB official - even if the one being "asked" is on the "john" in the men's room (which looked too clean, by the way!!!) and one official got killed by Mitchell Gant (Clint Eastwood) after telling him that his "papers were not in order".
The plane - a MiG-31 Firefox - looked like a craft that could have come from a sci-fi movie like "Star Wars" or "Star Trek". The First Secretary looked like someone who could "croak" at any minute just like the old hard-liners did back in the early 1980s beginning with Brezhnev and some of the other old "Bolsheviks" that followed who were beyond "expiration" prior to Gorbachev's rise to power that led to the fall of the Soviet Union itself nine years after the movie was released.
As a Cold War veteran myself, serving overseas in England at the time of its release, I was in my early twenties and for someone at that age the entire movie would be exciting to watch, and I had watched it several times. I was led to believe, "Did they really do that to people regardless if they're Russian or not minding their own business as they were walking the streets of Moscow?" or "Were the hotel rooms overlooking Red Square with the honor guards of the Red Army marching in full view that big and immaculate?" I later believed that the film and the book went a little overboard as I got older. Moscow, in a way, looked like as if it were a city in the West and not like it actually was back then.
I had to laugh at one portion of the film, and that was the Russian immigration official Gant encounters at the airport after he arrives in Moscow who tries to act really tough, "Are you threatening me?" This was rather silly.
Good movie, but some bad acting!!!
Movie Review: Cold War cliches
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm not sure whether Firefox is really a guilty pleasure or simply a film I remember as being one. It's certainly overlong and overfamiliar despite its neat Maguffin - Clint Eastwood's flashback-plagued Vietnam vet fighter ace has to steal a state-of-the-art warplane with a thought-controlled weapons system (as long as you remember to think in Russian) from the heart of the Evil Empire - but it has a sort of undemanding Cold War charm that the constant stream of clichés only reinforces. Even the old school model effects in the final chase-and-dogfight section are more fun in their way than modern CGI effects, especially when the Firefox is leaving a wall of water in its wake as it races across the sea or causing fallen snow to fill the air as it passes over the mountains, so it's a shame that much of the last third is played in darkened control rooms rather than the skies.
The Russians, naturally, are mostly played by British actors, albeit in this case actors best known for their sitcoms, which adds a different dimension to their scenes as comically humourless KGB types or lemming-like dissidents only too happy to die for the cause, or incorrigible hams like Freddie Jones who simply look like they SHOULD be in a sitcom. There's even an almost admirable perversity into giving most of the explanatory dialogue in the last half-hour to Klaus Löwitsch, an actor with a shaky grasp of spoken English who sounds like a bumblebee caught in a vacuum cleaner pipe. Not good by any means, but strangely watchable, and Maurice Jarre contributes an enjoyable score from the days before he disappeared entirely into atonal electronics.
The Region 1 DVD is the uncut theatrical version before Clint re-edited and trimmed the film by some 12 minutes without visibly improving it for video release (however, the European PAL DVD is the shorter version). Boasting a good 2.35:1 widescreen transfer, it also includes a 29-minute British behind the scenes documentary and the theatrical trailer.