Active Stealth

ACTIVE STEALTH is a military action film from B-movie purveyor Fred Olen Ray, who along with Charles Band must have made some of the silliest (and cheapest) movies of recent years. This one's a predictable action flick in which American stealth pilots go after the warlord of a made-up South American country and must rescue some kidnapped US hostages in the mean time.

As is the norm for one of these films - most of which seem to have been directed by Ray or Jim Wynorski - a lot of the more impressive action highlights have been lifted from other movies, CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER among them; this accounts for pretty much all of the aerial combat in this film. The stuff on the ground is a little more fun, with lots of cheesy macho dialogue, chest-thumping, and slow-motion shoot-outs with various goons.

The film features a laidback performance from Daniel Baldwin (recently of CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER fame, which says everything, and the least famous of the four brothers) as the tough hotshot, and he's supposed by a cast of the usual B-movie stereotypes. Watch out for a couple of old-timers, Andrew Stevens and Fred Williamson, playing officials. ACTIVE STEALTH is a pretty poor film but it's never boring, so it's far from the worst of this genre.

I can't comment on the military discrepancies (I think some 90% of all those watching this film also don't know anything as specific about the army as FLIRs and DLIRs) but the movie has some extremely silly situations in general. For example, take the scene where the two soldiers are playing with cups and a coin in a cell and fool their guard. It wouldn't be funny even in a comedy.

Indeed an appalling movie. When I saw the ridiculous air explosions effects I thought the movie had been made in 1980s. But it was made in around 1999!

I happened to catch this on one of the cable channels a while back, and the previous reviewer is square-on, it is terrible. This film couldn't have cost more than a hundred grand to make. I've seen better home movies. Daniel Baldwin walks through this looking like he has a perpetual hang-over, and is way too overweight to be taken seriously as a military pilot. He must have been desperate for work at the time. I once served in the Army Rangers with Tim Abell, which is why I kept watching this. While he will never be mistaken for Olivier, Tim has made a name for himself as a notable B-actor, and he seems to find a lot of work. However, this is definitely not his finest effort; in fact, the producers should have hired him as a military consultant instead.

Everything in this movie stinks -- from a fat and wasted looking William Baldwin to an insulting inattention to military detail. I don't expect much from mine-run action flicks but this one was incredibly bad, even by my relaxed standards for the genre. For example, as our heroes are flying in to make the rescue (don't ask), a young female soldier asks the Colonel back at the base, "Do you think they have a chance, sir?" to which the Colonel answers, "Not a chance in hell, but they might make it anyway." Perhaps the only trite line I did not hear was, "It's an old trick, but it just might work." Maxwell Smart would have been comfortable in this one.

Just like my joke it was terrible. The plot was lame, the acting dire. The warning on the end of the film should have read, "Any similarity to realities real or imaginary is coincidental'. I will say one thing in its defence. No one on the film probably even talked to the army or airforce, most of the Intruder scenes at the start of the movie are stolen from `Flight of the Intruder' a Vietnam War film. These clips seem to have been included where they generally looked good for the plot so of course, the internal shots didn't match the externals. All I can really say about this film is AVOID!