Intruding

One of the elements I'm incorporating into Castro's Folly is air combat, something I've mostly avoided because I felt it was too technical. To get a feel for that, I thought I'd start easy. I watched Flight of the Intruder. A movie I haven't seen in decades and I thought was ok but somehow missing something.

After re-watching I stand by that. This review by Roger Ebert is spot on:

"Flight of the Intruder" is a buddy movie about Navy pilots in the Vietnam War, circa 1972. It's a little darker than most buddy movies - the buddies keep having to be replaced when pilots are killed - and it has the germ of an idea to it. But it's a strangely disconnected movie that leads up to a point, makes it, and then drones on for another 45 minutes in increasingly witless cliches.

Aerial chase scene: check.
Bar room brawl: check
Above two scenes done to rockabilly piano score: check
Female love interest: check
Dacing scene (good god its hard to watch): check
New family man getting killed: check

The musical score is god-awful and sounds like it was a cheap-o TV movie track.
Brad Johnson is not up to the task of leading man as Jake Grafton. Not at all. Frankly, he's barely up to the task of acting.

Which is not to say FOTI is a bad movie. It isn't.

Willem Defoe as Virgil Cole is something to watch. Cynical, caustic with a chincy mustache and a bit of hippy in him. Many a sentence he ends with 'man'.

After being shot down he goes into the air in tiger-stripe camo, face black and carrying a bowie knife. And he has a past, so I guess that's another check. 'I like to fight,' he tells Grafton early on.

The aerial sequences are pretty good too, but the attack on SAM city is ludicrous.

This isn't really a movie review, but I'd give it 3 stars.  Fun to watch.

FOTI was one of John Milius' war movies, we'll have more to say about that man in future postings.