Skilled professionals live it up in an exotic and dangerous location. They get drunk every night. They smuggle opium. They drop pigs in parachutes. They fly under impossibly hazardous conditions. They dress weird and act weirder. They're iconoclastic, outrageous. They violate every rule of command and have contempt for their employers at the CIA. They're irreplaceable.
Nope. It's not "Only Angels Have Wings" and it's not "M*A*S*H." It's an uneasy mixture of the two that unfortunately comes across as more silly than funny.
It aims at shock, amusement, and education, but doesn't really achieve its goals.
As far as its shock value is concerned, well, we're inured by now, aren't we? Does it really shock anyone that a bunch of hard-living pilots flew secret missions in Laos in the 1970s? No, it's not shocking. It's not even educational now, under our current circumstances, when it would be interesting to learn that some paramilitary excursion was NOT buried in a file labeled National Interest, Defense de Toucher. That's okay. So we've been wised up a little and are no longer neither so shockable nor so dumb.
The problem in this case is that the film depends on those very qualities for its power to amuse. Without that, the film implodes. A group of shaggy drunken CIA pilots are sitting around in a cat house, goosing the girls, shooting out the lights with a silenced pistol, killing lizards with same. Asks newbie pilot Robert Downey, Jr., "When you guys act like this does it mean there's something to celebrate?" Replies another, guffawing, "No, it means it's night time." That might be funny if we expected renegade pilots to be as upright as the rest of us. If we don't, the gag, like the movie, falls flat.
There are action scenes naturally. The shots of airplanes flying, landing, taking off, crashing, are impressive. Everything that can possibly happen in or to an airplane in flight happens in or to an airplane in flight. People fall out of them, baggage is thrown haphazardly out of their hatches, engines fail, they sustain damage from AAA, the are torn apart during crash landings, but we've seen most of this elsewhere, often done better.
Some might find this funnier than I did, and the acting is pretty good. Robert Downey Jr. is especially effective as the straight man. I particularly enjoyed Lane Smith as the well-intentioned but thoroughly naiv visiting Senator. Greeted at the Laos airport by CIA officians and the Laotion brass, he hands his luggage to an Asian general and says, "Take big bag to blue car." He's always enjoyable. He was my co-star in "Weeds," a work of art if there ever was one. Check out the other comments and if they describe a film that you might find appealing, then by all means watch it. There might be some laughs in it that escaped me.
