Flyboys Reviews
Top Critic
Aafter a while -- there must be six major fights against unending numbers of German planes -- it feels like special effects run amok.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Why make such a corny and incredibly predictable film?
The painstaking authenticity and appealing cast of Flyboys can't overcome the cloyingly formulaic nature of its story.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
This is old-school moviemaking, for better or worse, which means rat-a-tat dogfights in the sky combined with overripe romantic and social clichés on the ground.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Besides some fine dogfight sequences, it often feels threadbare, just an exercise in recycling.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Flyboys has computer imaging and a fleet of vintage aircraft on its side, but it remains considerably less convincing than Wings (1927), and less exciting.
| Original Score: 2/4
It's watchable, but this was an epic tale deserving of a huge canvas and, frankly, a better director and actors. And a less simplistic script.
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| Original Score: 2/5
The high-altitude combat is thrilling, and aviation buffs will thrill to all the pretty biplanes sailing through the clouds. But the characters are corny and the situations are clichéd.
The computer-generated flying effects are the only reason to see the movie, but at some point somebody left the computer on too long, so it went ahead and spat out the script.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Flyboys is so schematic and contrived, you can anticipate exactly what scene is going to come next, and who will be the next to die in combat.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This is spectacle in the grand old style, a bygone shot of adrenaline and grace.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The creators of Flyboys know no image too clichéd, no narrative convention too exhausted and no psychological motivation too pat that it can't do service.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Sometimes corn works. Sometimes it doesn't. Flyboys flops.
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| Original Score: C-
A good documentary might have been a far more interesting film to make.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This cornball effort pales in comparison with the best World War I dramas. Flyboys doesn't feel particularly realistic, nor is it especially entertaining.
| Original Score: D+
If the current legroom in economy class doesn't make you resent the birth of the Wright Brothers, Flyboys certainly will. Like a flight from New York to Los Angeles, it's bad and it's long.
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| Original Score: 1/4
When Flyboys finally ends, a too-long 139 minutes later, there's a sense of emptiness, perhaps even disgust.
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| Original Score: C-
The aerial dogfights are thrilling, but the script seems to have been written by Snoopy.
Those amazing young heroes from the second decade of the last century -- our first true fighter pilots -- deserve so much more than what's served up in this very disappointing attempt.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The movie's straightforward and ingratiating, and as pretty-boy history lessons go, it's a lot less obnoxious than Pearl Harbor.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Despite the brutal dogfights and inevitable deaths, there's little gravity or resonance.
A valentine to WWI's first American fighter pilots that doesn't quite reach its aimed-for heights.
Near the start of Flyboys, the squadron's grizzled vet hands suicide pistols to the new pilots, to be used if they find themselves in a no-win situation. Unfortunately, the audience is offered no such option.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Empty headed and egregiously polite, this nostalgia trip to the First World War is what youd get if Norman Rockwell directed Top Gun.
| Original Score: 3/5
A tie-in Flyboys video game is now available, designed to coincide with the film's release. I guarantee that script will be better than this one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
One wishes this particular version did more than make glancing references to the despair and disillusion that was as much a part of this particular war as the exploding dirigibles and officers' bonhomie.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Agreeably antiquated and enjoyable to the core, Flyboys is proof that they can, occasionally, make 'em like they used to.
| Original Score: 3/4
Watching Flyboys, it's hard not to giggle and think of Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.
Full Review
| Original Score: D
This is a lost opportunity on an epic scale. The actors are so styled and the dogfights so drippy with CG that, as a period piece, the movie almost looks like it's set in the future.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
The result guarantees a thrill a minute for all ages, and a few tears, too, in an old-fashioned kind of war movie with heart (in the best kind of tradition) that keeps you on the edge of your seat with your mouth wide open.
Among these combatants, you won't find much All Quiet on the Western Front-style despair, and the paths of glory are unsullied by doubt or disillusionment.
