{"id":4103,"date":"2024-09-18T19:04:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T19:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=4103"},"modified":"2024-10-13T18:09:42","modified_gmt":"2024-10-13T22:09:42","slug":"fire-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/09\/18\/fire-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"Fire Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Fire Birds <\/strong>(1990)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Touchstone\/Action-Adventure\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 87 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (language, action violence, some sexual content, drug references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: David Green\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Nick Thiel and Paul F. Edwards\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: David Newman\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Tony Imi\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: May 25, 1990 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Nicolas Cage, Tommy Lee Jones, Sean Young, Bryan Kestner, Bert Rhine, Dale Dye, Mary Ellen Trainor, J.A. Preston, Peter Onorati, Gabriel Lopez.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $14.7M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: *<\/p>\n

\u00a0Once again, I find myself struggling over how many stars I should award a particular movie. The movie in question is Fire Birds<\/strong>, a Top Gun knock-off starring Nicolas Cage, Tommy Lee Jones and Sean Young. In the abstract, it\u2019s bad. The screenplay is one of those Identikit deals, assembled out of familiar parts from other, presumably better movies. It introduces a threat to the American way of life, in this case a South American drug cartel, then pushes it aside with only an occasional reminder until the climax.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Most of the movie is devoted to the training program and a handful of related personal dramas, all badly handled. The acting is terrible. Watching Fire Birds<\/strong>, you can\u2019t believe Cage and Jones went on to win Oscars (Leaving Las Vegas and The Fugitive respectively). The music is cheesy. The score basically consists of that heavily orchestrated, snare drum-heavy music commonly heard in military-themed actioners. The soundtrack contains two Phil Collins songs including a sappy one whose intro is heard every time Cage and Young have a scene together. Even the aerial sequences are nothing special. They\u2019re okay, but the makers don\u2019t do anything that hasn\u2019t already been done in similar movies.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I could go on listing what\u2019s wrong with Fire Birds<\/strong>, but maybe I ought to describe the plot before continuing. Before I do that, I want to call attention to director David Green\u2019s (Buster) creative decision to kick things off with a quote from then-President Bush about the war against drugs. Normally, I\u2019d call him out for including such blatant political propaganda, but Fire Birds<\/strong> is such a ridiculous movie that it\u2019s impossible to take any of it seriously.<\/p>\n

\u00a0As to the story, it purportedly centers on a joint DEA-US Army operation to dismantle one of the largest cartels operating out of South America. First, they must recruit a few good men (and one good woman) to train on the newest attack helicopter, the Apache. It\u2019s the only aircraft capable of matching the firepower of the Scorpion flown by the cartel leader. It\u2019s already taken out a couple of Black Hawks and Cobras. The \u201ctop gun\u201d of the team is Jake Preston (Cage), a cocky and overconfident sort usually played by Tom Cruise. The flight instructor is veteran pilot Brad Little (Jones) who keeps hounding his superiors to be included in the mission. Also on the team is Billie Lee Guthrie (Young, No Way Out) who\u2019s revealed to be Preston\u2019s ex-girlfriend. He still has feelings for her, she claims not to feel the same way, you know the drill.<\/p>\n

\u00a0From here on in, Fire Birds<\/strong> strictly adheres to formula by touching on the following tried-and-true story elements:<\/p>\n

(1) The relationship between Little and Preston. The senior officer is simultaneously impressed and flustered by the gifted young pilot.<\/p>\n

(2) The rekindling of Preston and Billie\u2019s romance. It\u2019s complicated by his belief that a woman isn\u2019t cut out to be a pilot. Naturally, she takes offense to that.<\/p>\n

(3) Preston is a very good pilot who has difficulty using the Apache\u2019s visual input function. It\u2019s revealed that he suffers from a left eye dominance disability which is easily corrected by having Little make him drive around the base with one eye covered by a makeshift periscope.<\/p>\n

(4) Little wants to be an active participant in the mission, but some express concern that he may be too old.<\/p>\n

During this time, we get a few reminders of the cartel situation like news stories on TVs and Little\u2019s superiors reminding him he doesn\u2019t have a lot of time to whip his group into shape. A major deal is supposed to go down in just days so the training has to be accelerated. One can only suspend disbelief so far before it can go no further.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Fire Birds<\/strong> is embarrassingly jingoistic and about as sophisticated as a GI Joe cartoon. It\u2019s not so much a movie as it is an extended Army recruitment ad. The scenes of the soldiers training feel like instructional films (the You and Your Apache series). I will concede the Apaches are pretty cool, but I wish there had been more scenes of them in combat. Sadly, Fire Birds<\/strong> doesn\u2019t really deliver in that area. The opening scene and the climax, that\u2019s it. Even then, the scenes aren\u2019t all that exciting. I\u2019ll be nice and say they\u2019re at least competently edited and photographed.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The dialogue is woeful with such lines as \u201cThis operation will be a failure if we all die.\u201d and \u201cWhen we have mastered these tactics, we will use them to seek out and confront the forces of evil and kill \u2018em deader than hell!\u201d The clear winner, however, is Billie who gets to say, \u201cOh Jake, save my ass.\u201d after her aircraft is severely damaged in a dogfight with the bad guy. This occurs just ten minutes (screen time) after they have a heated argument at the base over her taking part in the mission. In that scene, we get a full display of Cage\u2019s trademark acting style when he shouts, \u201cWHY \u2026. IS IT SO HARD \u2026. FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND \u2026. THAT I JUST DON\u2019T WANT YOU TO GET HURT!\u201d at the top of his lungs. He was wearing shades, but I assume his eyes were bugging out as per usual.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Fire Birds<\/strong> is an emotionally hollow viewing experience. Remember how all the girls cried when Goose died in Top Gun? Well, nary a tear is likely to be shed when Preston\u2019s best friend\u2019s meets the same fate. His name is Breaker (Kestner, The Running Man) and while he shows up in a handful of scenes, we never get to know him well enough to care when he meets his demise. Character development doesn\u2019t appear to be a priority in Fire Birds<\/strong> as all we get are character types right out of the Basic Screenwriting 101 textbook. The same can be said for story development as none of the aforementioned elements get more than a superficial and cursory treatment.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Fire Birds<\/strong> is a bad movie on virtually every level and fully deserving of its one-star rating. However, it has this strange watchability factor that I can only attribute to how unintentionally hilarious it is. It might have done better box office if the studio had the foresight to market it as a spoof instead of a straight action picture. Some of it is actually funnier than Hot Shots. In that respect, Fire Birds<\/strong> is worth at least one viewing. It has more laughs than many of today\u2019s intentional comedies. I almost gave it more than one star for this reason, but common sense ultimately prevailed. No matter how unintentionally funny it is, it\u2019s still terrible and fully deserving of a single star.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fire Birds (1990)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Touchstone\/Action-Adventure\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 87 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (language, action violence, some sexual content, drug references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: David Green\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Nick Thiel and Paul F. Edwards\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: David Newman\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Tony Imi\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: May 25, 1990 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Nicolas Cage, Tommy Lee Jones, Sean Young, Bryan Kestner, Bert Rhine, Dale Dye, Mary Ellen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-adventure","category-this-sucks-so-bad"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Fire-Birds-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4103"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4868,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4103\/revisions\/4868"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}