Better Late Then Never

Best movie ever!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

"The Ultimate Street Fight At 50,000 Feet!" As if Desert Thunder (1999) wasn't enough, from the team of Jim Wynorski, Lenny Juliano, some stock footage, miniatures, and a green screen comes Stealth Fighter, the tale of Ryan "Iron Man" Mitchell (Mandylor) a Harry Connick Jr. lookalike who is a member of a special ops team who reports directly to President Westwood (Hudson). When his former buddy Owen Turner (-T) starts working for evil terrorist mastermind Roberto Menendez (Divoff), bad things start to happen.They sink a submarine with a full crew on board, initiate the killer satellite Thanatos to blow up the world, and on top of that, Turner steals a stealth fighter jet. Meanwhile Mitchell is trying to repair his family life with his wife Erin (Eleniak) and daughter J.P. (Dampf). So he offers to go on this one last mission to save the world.You know Menendez is evil because he sports an ascot. Lister plays his muscle named Berg. All he does is bug out his eyes. The best actor in the movie is Sarah Dampf as Mitchell's precocious daughter. The code name "Eagle One" makes another appearance just like in Desert Thunder. The movie is filled to the brim with silly slang and you have to activate the closed captioning to understand the dialogue: "You've just been splashed!", "The Bird", The usage of "SAMS", etc. There's also the funny mission names such as "Black Raven" and "Operation: Clean Sweep".A tongue-in-cheek scene occurs when William Sadler, as Mitchell's commanding officer Frank Peterson, sits behind his desk and yells "You're a wild card!" Also in that scene, Sadler calls him "Kenny" for some reason. Strangely, his daughter claims to have a boyfriend named Kenny. In that same scene, his wife offers Mitchell some iced tea. Of all drinks, why that? Speaking of the man, he wears some funny shirts and spits out his lines in his own inimitable way. He's part tough, part goofy. Somehow he doesn't seem like an expert with planes. In the final battle between him and Mitchell, we even get to see his martial arts stylings, or Ice-Fu if you will.Many things in Stealth Fighter are prescient. Ernie Hudson is cast as the President, predating Obama. They talk about Electro-magnetic Pulse attacks, which have been in the news recently.The title has two meanings: Mitchell himself, and the plane in question. The submarine subplot wasn't substantial, it was pretty subpar.In all, if you like cardboard planes, goofy DTV action, Jim Wynorski, or Desert Thunder (which is superior to this) and you want slang-filled, utterly brainless action, then watch Stealth Fighter.For more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com

Well, this is a busy little film. There is a stricken submarine on the bottom of the sea, an orbiting death ray ("It's not part of the Star Wars project, IT IS the Star Wars project!") and a stolen stealth fighter that is used by one of the villains as a rather excessive assassination weapon. All of which add up to .... not much at all. Low budget film making can be an art in the sense that good imagination can make up for a lack of dollars, besting mega-budget productions, but not in this case. Using other people's footage can lead to wonderful continuity blunders. For example the villains are hiding out in Angola and our heroes get dropped off an aircraft carrier and paddle to the shore. Unfortunately the caption on the borrowed footage says the aircraft carried is off the coast of Lebanon! Our heroes had a heck of a lot of paddling to do.And Ice T may have played that funky music once upon a time but as an actor in this he is laughable. All the menace of a wet lettuce. A paltry effort and not even the great William Sadler could save it. His character blows his brains out near the end. One knew how he felt.

Okay, this is an action flick, Ice-T, Tiny Lister as super bad boys, Costas Mandylor as the tough hero risking his future with his family to serve his country. I guess if you are fans of those guys there is something in here, but couldn't you have given them a tighter story, and better execution. And, puleeeze, make it a little believable. This is pure formula with too much unbelievability, like when Ice-t rats out William Sadler's character to the president and his staff. Why did I know that Sadler was going to be leak here. That is another example of formulaic casting. Give the guy some roles where he's not the bad guy so its a harder to spot. Or how about the fight at the end where highly decorated Costas' character puts down his gun so he can go hand to hand with Ice-T's character? Then Ice-T doesn't kill him!? What is that? Some kind of honor among thugs routine? It is just too much of a fairy tale to be a good action flick. Costas "sneaking up" on character after character while making all kinds of noise, the enemy compound so sophisticated it controls top secret space satellites, but such shoddy security that the marines' walkie-talkies go undetected as far a underground subs and Costas runs around without any surveillance picking him up. TOO Unbelievable!!!!

Apparently there were more affects from the Y2K problem than we knew about, like this movie made in 2000 for example.When it came on TV early this morning I came prepared with my IMDb.com in hand. So I already knew it was a stupid movie, but I wanted to see what the reviewers were talking about.But I won't go into it, you really have to be at least a "Colonel" in the Navy to grasp the technology in this movie. As a prior Marine Corps Officer, I was sick to my stomach to see the supposed Marine Corps personnel in the "White House", with their bathrobe like uniforms and long hair. They could have hired the lowliest Private in the USMC to provide technical guidance at $45 a day, and he/she would have fixed almost every technical flaw of the military innacuracies.And when the "Colonel" of the Navy reported to the President, I pretty much had it. The movie is still on, but I cannot watch it anymore.BTW, if you want to see a really good "flying" movie, that was made using a lot of stock footage from an earlier movie, watch Dawn Patrol (1938) with Errol Flynn. Its hard to believe that movies 60+ years earlier than this one could still be more accurate, AND expertly use footage from other movies. But I suppose the studio owned the earlier movies back then, as opposed to this movie that just stole them.Aside from technology, acting was better back then too! Oh well, read the other reviews, they do a much better job then me. (p.s., I see that IMDb pointed out IMDb as a possible spelling mistake:)