Stealth

Herald rating: *

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography, Ambrose Bierce wrote 100 years ago. The intervening century and this movie go a long way to proving the old cynic was on the money.

Three US Navy pilots - Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Kara Wade (Jessica Biel) and Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx) - fly stealth bombers out of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, patrolling the Philippine Sea under Captain George Cummings (Sam Shepard).

They believe that three is a lucky number but they have to accept a fourth buddy, the computer that controls the new Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle codenamed Extreme Deep Invader. This makes them unhappy. Gannon and Wade are so unhappy they have to spend lots of time cuddling under the covers to work through their grief.

There is an emergency in Rangoon. Terrorists want to blow up a building and the computer tells them if that happens, a lot of people will be killed. The pilots figure a way to blow up the building with their planes (oops! I think we've seen that one before) without killing anyone.

Lightning strikes Extreme Deep Invader. It starts to download all the songs from the internet (I am not making this up) and to disobey its orders.

Meanwhile our three pilots go to Thailand, where they meet a nice local girl, thus making a different kind of foursome. She doesn't speak English so it's safe to spill all the superpower's military secrets in front of her.

Hold the phone! A warlord in a former Soviet republic has nuclear bombs and knows how to use them. A mushroom cloud threatens 500,000 people, and guess who can save them?

There is much more of this silly stuff until Wade's plane crashes in North Korea while Gannon is flying around Alaska. Gannon and Extreme Deep Invader ignore their orders and fly to Wade's rescue.

Big, dumb, loud, sexist, and that's reinforced in a minimalist DVD that offers scant extras: a brief behind-the-scenes, a soundtrack doco, a music video plus interviews with the band, Incubus.

DVD, Video Rental Today