Flyboys: Critic Reviews

This is a lost opportunity on an epic scale. The actors are so styled and the dogfights so drippy with CG that, as a period piece, the movie almost looks like it's set in the future.

Empty headed and egregiously polite, this nostalgia trip to the First World War is what youd get if Norman Rockwell directed Top Gun.

An inflated wannabe epic.

The movie's straightforward and ingratiating, and as pretty-boy history lessons go, it's a lot less obnoxious than Pearl Harbor.

Among these combatants, you won't find much All Quiet on the Western Front-style despair, and the paths of glory are unsullied by doubt or disillusionment.

Aafter a while -- there must be six major fights against unending numbers of German planes -- it feels like special effects run amok.

This is spectacle in the grand old style, a bygone shot of adrenaline and grace.

When Flyboys finally ends, a too-long 139 minutes later, there's a sense of emptiness, perhaps even disgust.

If the current legroom in economy class doesn't make you resent the birth of the Wright Brothers, Flyboys certainly will. Like a flight from New York to Los Angeles, it's bad and it's long.

Those amazing young heroes from the second decade of the last century -- our first true fighter pilots -- deserve so much more than what's served up in this very disappointing attempt.

A tie-in Flyboys video game is now available, designed to coincide with the film's release. I guarantee that script will be better than this one.

The aerial dogfights are thrilling, but the script seems to have been written by Snoopy.

Flyboys has computer imaging and a fleet of vintage aircraft on its side, but it remains considerably less convincing than Wings (1927), and less exciting.

Agreeably antiquated and enjoyable to the core, Flyboys is proof that they can, occasionally, make 'em like they used to.

Sometimes corn works. Sometimes it doesn't. Flyboys flops.

Near the start of Flyboys, the squadron's grizzled vet hands suicide pistols to the new pilots, to be used if they find themselves in a no-win situation. Unfortunately, the audience is offered no such option.

The result guarantees a thrill a minute for all ages, and a few tears, too, in an old-fashioned kind of war movie with heart (in the best kind of tradition) that keeps you on the edge of your seat with your mouth wide open.

Despite the brutal dogfights and inevitable deaths, there's little gravity or resonance.

The computer-generated flying effects are the only reason to see the movie, but at some point somebody left the computer on too long, so it went ahead and spat out the script.

It's watchable, but this was an epic tale deserving of a huge canvas and, frankly, a better director and actors. And a less simplistic script.

This is old-school moviemaking, for better or worse, which means rat-a-tat dogfights in the sky combined with overripe romantic and social cliches on the ground.

The creators of Flyboys know no image too cliched, no narrative convention too exhausted and no psychological motivation too pat that it can't do service.

A valentine to WWI's first American fighter pilots that doesn't quite reach its aimed-for heights.