‘Stealth’ Heads to Video Release at Mach 5

“Don’t think. Drink.”

As the three white-clad pilots raised their glasses after a hard day’s work in Rob Cohen ’71’s latest flick, “Stealth,” I regretted not being able to follow their lead. Surely, some pre-gaming would have dulled my growing desire to end my misery by inflicting bodily harm upon myself.

Had I taken this precaution, though, I would have regretted it a few shots later, as the erratic zooms, flips, wobbles, and generally nauseating angles would have caused me to regurgitate my breakfast. In a shallow movie that provokes only two questions—“What?” and then, “Dear God, why?”—it’s a surprise that the camerawork, which espouses the philosophy that the more the camera shakes, the more action must be happening, is the work of Academy Award-winning cinematographer Dean Semler (he won for 1991’s “Dancing with Wolves”). Semler and Cohen “pioneered” the camera shake in 2002’s “xXx.”

Another Oscar-winner, Jamie Foxx, also demonstrates that even victors have bills to pay—got to buy a few more cars to maintain that star lifestyle. Maybe those gigantic sunglasses that keep shading the eyes of his character, Lieutenant Henry Purcell, are Foxx’s way of channeling his past good fortune into a piece of acting that can only be described as mediocre. It’s as if his agent reminded him to “keep smiling and swaying, and maybe the audience will think Ray became a jet pilot.”

Rounding out the cast are B-list stars Josh Lucas (best known as Reese Witherspoon’s rejected Southern love in “Sweet Home Alabama”) and Jessica Biel, known as the “wild child” Mary Camden in TV’s “Seventh Heaven,” and, oh yeah, for her topless pictorial in Gear magazine. But you’re probably not going to garner too many big names for your summer blockbuster when your pitch goes: “It’s like ‘Top Gun’ married ‘The Terminator’/‘I, Robot’/every other man vs. machine movie made, and they had a terribly deformed, ugly love child that they kicked down the stairs.”

The actual details of “Stealth” are more mind-numbing, but it’s really a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to allow us to look at sculpted bodies and watch pretty planes zoom by while things blow up. Lt. Purcell, Lt. Ben Gannon (Lucas), and Lt. Kara Wade (Biel) are the three U.S. Navy pilots chosen to fly highly advanced Stealth fighter jets—I know, this ragtag bunch just screams “elite.” But the drama heats up when a fourth unit, “Edi,” an artificially intelligent, unmanned combat aerial vehicle, joins the team.

Potential problems are not lost on a smarty like Gannon. When Captain George Cumming (Sam Shepard) announces, “Edi flies all by himself,” Gannon quickly corrects, steely-eyed, “You mean itself.” Sadly, Edi isn’t all that scary, even when he (it?) starts threatening to bomb things, because Cohen only lets his computer villain speak in “traditional computer-ese.”

Cohen, who put his Harvard credentials to good work with such masterpieces (gasp) as “The Fast and the Furious” and the aforementioned “xXx,” drops to new levels here. Despite giving Edi a full database of angry rock music to play while he zooms through the sky, we never really feel the action. The ring of fire explosion shown in the trailer doesn’t leave your heart pumping, and even a total building demolition seems lackluster. Though Foxx is trying hard to emulate Will Smith (with the hippest new lingo, too—on seeing Edi: “It is a bag of chips alright”) he fails to deliver the humor he once did in “In Living Color” or even “Booty Call.”

Then there are love interests Gannon and Wade. A chance trip to Thailand allows them to glisten and gleam as the water slides off their bodies, but the longish, supposedly sultry stares leave you anticipating a “bam-chick-a-bam-bam” background sound.

Even the real life warfare allusions are clichéd and ridiculous. Not only are Russia and North Korea on the radar first, but Cumming’s tough “I expect nothing less than perfection” stance is countered by Wade’s poignant remark about combat: “If it’s controlled by moral people it will be moral.” Right.

Though “Stealth” starts out as plain ol’ bad, it is saved at the end, as it moves into the realm of amusingly horrendous. As Wade plummets to her possible death in the plane ejector’s seat, we hear her screams back at base over her still intact radio unit. A vivid, second-by-second narration follows with such gems as “My suit is on fire. It is on fire,” as well as “I’m hit. I’m hit” after she is walloped with a piece of the plane in free fall. But nothing is better than her ability to countdown how many feet she is in the air as she waits to deploy her parachute.

A few surprises remain at the end, including a new enemy or two, which are mildly unexpected, though mired in pitiful dialogue and unintentionally comical scenes. Certainly Cohen was not aiming for greatness, but he couldn’t even break the summer action sound barrier. A few careers are in danger of crash landing along with “Stealth”; we’ll have to wait and see if someone makes it out alive.

—Staff writer Margaret M. Rossman can be reached at rossman@fas.harvard.edu.