The film was truly awful and during the later stages, my mind turned to how best to describe it in my review.  Without being completely distasteful (which I often am), I thought about another film from director Rob Cohen, The Fast & The Furious.

I’m not a huge action fan but I enjoyed Furious.  The stunts were pretty cool and there was a half-interesting storyline.  There was an undercover cop, a gang of street racers and some rough and ready romance.  It’s the kind of film I could easily watch again and would recommend it to most people.

Stealth, on the other hand, doesn’t even have the basic structure a movie.  There’s no script and some of the action sequences look like they’ve been put together by a 7-year-old on an etch-a-sketch.  What you see on screen is special effects gone mad.  You see planes zipping around the sky but it all happens so fast and so stupidly, that there’s no hope of finding any sanity amongst it all.

The “plot” concerns a group of three elite pilots who have been introduced to their latest team member.  The quirk is that the new addition isn’t real – it’s a robotic plane with super-intelligence that can fly without human control.  Unfortunately, the Americans who designed it, failed to test it properly.  It’s been rushed into operation and goes off and causes a nuclear bomb to detonate in some country near Russia with an unpronounceable name.

It seems the only people who can save the day are the three real pilots (played by Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx).  They go in search of the rogue plane and try to bring it back under their control.  In doing so, they blow up a hell of a lot of people in North Korea but that’s ok, because North Korea is bad, right?  And by creating a fictitious enemy, it takes the focus away from the fact that it’s the American military and its corruption and arrogance that is the real enemy.

Ok, I know I’m being disrespectful now so I apologise.  It’s hard not to get fired up by a clichéd ridden piece of tripe.  Fans of Jessica Biel (The Rules Of Attraction) might enjoy the film.  They somehow manage to weave in a scene where she goes to Thailand for a holiday and wanders around near a waterfall in a revealing bikini for a few minutes.  Doesn’t have much context but neither does anything else in the film.

Late in the film, there are two cameos from Australians Richard Roxburgh (Moulin Rouge) and John Waters.  This struck me as strange but I learned later that the film was made here in Australia at Fox Studios in Sydney.  What a waste of resources.