BEFORE: I'm not entirely sure that this fits in with the superhero chain, but I'm going to give it a whirl, especially since Gary Oldman was also in "Dracula" with Billy Campbell (last seen in "Ghost Town"). I'm at the point where I have to take the linkings where I can find them...
THE PLOT: A young pilot stumbles onto a prototype jetpack that allows him to become a high flying masked hero.
AFTER: Ah, pity the poor film that has to follow "The Dark Knight Rises". Almost any film would probably pale by comparison to such perfection. Why, this film's hero only has a jet-pack, and Batman's got a cool helicopter, a cool motorcycle, a mansion with underground caves, a butler, and he's a billionaire. Err, was. This guy's a poor lowly test pilot, and we don't even know if his parents died tragically! What kind of a superhero is that?
This whole film felt kind of lackluster in general, and I'm trying to figure out why that is. It had the misfortune of being released in 1991, just a few years before superhero films got really hot again, but it's also set in the 1930's, which is a period that a few key Hollywood people seem really enamored with, but audiences don't always glom on to. Why should we care so much about stuff that happened 80 years ago? It's not like there's some kind of 1930's revival going on, with Glenn Miller on the radio and people dressing in Depression-era clothes. If anything nostalgia tends to run in a 25-30 year cycle, which explains the current fascination with 80's culture, and why music acts like Styx, Toto and Cheap Trick are still touring, among many others. Even in 1991 anyone who was around in the 1930's was either dead or in a nursing home.
So I have to assume the story demanded being set in the 1930's. OK, so we've got mobsters and FBI agents and Fascists all looking for this jetpack (but they all wear the same suits, so it's kind of hard to tell who's who....) but my other main problem here is, it's JUST a jetpack. No one's going to win the upcoming Second World War with one jetpack - it's not even a weapon, just a mode of transportation. How is it going to change the world? It's like the segway of the jazz age.
Even if you could fly with this jet-pack without burning your legs off (seems unlikely, considering how much flame comes out), all it's good for is getting from place to place. And in a wild, uncontrollable manner at that. I mean, we've technically got jet-packs now, but nobody uses them, I guess because they're impractical. All they're going to lead to is mid-air crashes, followed by people falling to their deaths. I just watched a news segment last week about flying cars - how the 1950's media predicted we'd have them by now, and we probably could - but who's going to regulate all that airspace? Do we want cars falling on our houses when they crash in the air or run out of gas? Really, what you get when you combine a car and a plane is a hybrid that doesn't really fly OR drive well, which is a shame.
Kind of like when you set out to make a action-movie/comedy spoof hybrid, you might end up with a film that falls a little flat on both fronts. But hey, the same director later had success with the "Captain America" film, which was also a hero film set in the WWII era, so I'm willing to concede this film might just have been made at the wrong time.
Also starring Jennifer Connelly (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Alan Arkin (last seen in "The Muppets"), Timothy Dalton (last seen in "Licence to Kill"), Terry O'Quinn (last seen in "The X-Files"), Paul Sorvino (last seen in "Oh, God!"), Jon Polito (last seen in "Miller's Crossing"), Margo Martindale (last seen in "Win Win").
RATING: 4 out of 10 gas tankers
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