John Milius is/was at his best doing balls to the wall historical stories where he took the piss but also didn't. Adapting a best selling novel seems to have frozen him up.
It looks tremendous - production values are high and there's loving shots of bombers. But it's not exciting. There's no emotion.
Story wise it has problems. It's almost an hour before Johnson suggests bombing Hanoi - this really needed to happen within a half hour and it's easy to see all the stuff that could be cut out: the military patter with Danny Glover "hilariously" abusing his men, Tom Sizemore talking about his kid and the mother who is ugly but got a great body and he can trust the ugly ones more, comic antics at a bar with Vietnamese hookers and a brawl with fighter pilots.
It uses too many cliches - Willem Dafoe has a reputation for abandoning his fellow flyer but he only did it for half an hour before going back, people talk about their kids before dying, downed airmen go "give up on me".
It's actually an interesting idea for a story - bomber pilots have to deal with restrictive rules of war and get so frustrated they decided to take on Hanoi. But this really isn't dramatised in an interesting way - Dafoe and Johnson get out of it the moment they get in trouble, Glover sooks but then is conveniently shot down required he be rescued.
The characters are dull - tight, wound up, with none of Milius' flamboyant humour. There is humour but it's "hardy har har I'm in the military" humour. Thing is, there is scope for some movement - maybe not the hero (Brad Johnson's performance is a bit monotone - he has trouble expressing grief and anger - but he does form a solid center) but the Dafoe and Glover characters really could have been jazzed up. It needed more 70s Milius. You don't pay him to reign it in - have him go for it. There's not even the flamboyance of Sean Connery dialogue in The Hunt for Red October.
Action-wise the film is hurt by the fact flying a bomber isn't that exciting on screen - you cut to scenes of people in cockpits shaking... you really need them shot down. But when that does happen at the end it's not very exciting. Milius wasn't a very good director.
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