he long explanatory scroll at the beginning sets it all up. More than 400 pilots tried out for this secret squad, and only three made it—Ben (Lucas), Kara (Biel) and Henry (Foxx). Or, in other words, the trio is made up of a blue-eyed pretty boy, a sexy girl who looks good in a bikini and an Oscar winner who's there for comic relief. The triad is tight-knit, but soon their commander, Capt. Cummings (Shepard), explains that a fourth will be added to their squad—a robot ship called an Extreme Deep Invader (EDI)—or "Eddie," as in Eddie Munster.
The team is naturally threatened by this intrusion. Henry (as the trailers all show) goes on a rant about the Holy Trinity, Three Stooges, Three Musketeers and of course, a ménage-a-trois, and that leaves no room for any artificial intelligence among them. Yet, after one successful mission—of a major terrorist hit and with no collateral damage—EDI is part of the team.
The sleek futuristic EDI, which looks like a bat and has a red eye that blinks, is nicknamed "Tin Man" by the humans, and they're all stationed on an aircraft carrier called the Abraham Lincoln run by Capt. Marshfield (Morton), who Henry points out very quickly is black. Marshfield and Cummings have an immediate disdain for each other as the new equipment is brought on board.
Meanwhile, Ben suddenly notices that Kara is female and realizes that he doesn't have to look for action among the locals, as he's used to doing. The interpersonal relationships among the trio become strained even without a self-thinking superjet in their midst. The EDI was masterminded by a high-tech genius based in Seattle named Keith Orbit (Roxburgh), who's of course called in when things go a bit haywire.
Common sense crashes and burns
The 2001: A Space Odyssey references are obvious, especially when the low-key stoic robotic voice (done by that soft-spoken Dinotopia guy Wentworth Miller) takes over EDI. "It can talk. So? I have a friend with a BMW that can talk, too," Henry says, unimpressed. And it's true that this renegade machine never seems to become as threatening or as creepy as HAL, or even as any of the other rogue machines we've seen in A.I.—Artificial Intelligence, War Games and films like that.
But with Rob Cohen, we expect lots of action, as in his The Fast and the Furious and XXX hits. And if Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg are his biggest competitors in the action genre for this summer, Cohen takes the prize by far.
The audience is sucked into many of the explosions. Some breathtaking special effects make for a bunch of memorable movie moments—such as an explosive ring of jet fuel that ignites in the air; a slow-motion crash of a jet into a cliff that shows each of the pieces break off slowly; a nuclear explosion in a remote fictional country annihilating an ages-old fortress; fast flying only 15 feet above land in order to avoid radar detection; and an explosion underwater that douses a fiery craft. But by far the best special effect is when Kara finds herself falling after ejecting out of an exploding fighter plane and radioing in her descent from 6,000 feet with the parts of the plane soaring around her. Then her parachute catches fire from the burning debris ... and the audience is falling along with her the entire time.
The settings span the globe—from the middle of the ocean to Alaska, Russia, North Korea and Thailand. Along the way, there's some great humor in the script, such as the friendly hostess girls who accompany Ben and Henry early in the film. When one of them announces she has to go "pee-pee," it's a line that Kara obviously later mocks at a timely moment. The three pilots are well defined with their own comedic moments, as when they are studying the new aircraft in solitude. (Foxx's character imagines himself on a red carpet saying, "No pictures, no pictures!") The real star in this is Lucas, who is shown to break out as an action star for the first time (Foxx has already proven it with Collateral and Biel with Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
But then there are the unforgivably ridiculous moments, like the lightning that strikes the plane in a rather Frankenstein-like moment and gives EDI its rogue energy, and the guy who is guardian of the plane who mysteriously gets reassigned, or the constant calculations by Kara of the amount of civilian casualties they'll expect with each strike (obviously because she's the girl, and she's the one who should care). And then there's the painful monologue Henry has with an Asian hooker, where he laments dropping bombs on pristine landscapes like the one they're walking on.
The technology is described in silly ways too, throwing around words like "quantum processing" and "it has a brain like sponge" and "it's analyzing you" when the trio touches the plane. At one point, Mr. Orbit, the creator, explains how the plane "can learn from Adolf Hitler the same as he can learn from Captain Kangaroo; you can't tell it how to distinguish." Um, well, yeah, you can. Program in "children's TV—good; Nazis—bad"!
When the new craft is explained on the aircraft carrier, Marshfield says, "This looks and sounds like science fiction." That line alone proves that they're trying too hard. And, on top of that, they're couching it all in a love story with a cheesy ending that may have you pounding your head against the wall.
