Active Stealth - Lautloser Tod

I only caught part of this movie as it was playing on HBO... One thing that caught me, aside from the hat the carrier commander was wearing said SSN, instead of CVN, was that when the pilot of the stealth went to hit his countermeasures, two of the buttons he hit were marked "FLIR" and "DLIR". For anyone who knows even a little about military aircraft, FLIR and DLIR are radars, NOT flares or other countermeasures. This was just a bad movie, even from the few parts I saw. It's an insult to every military pilot out there and to anyone who even knows a little bit about the planes featured. The fact that the F-117 is NOT a 2-seater, let alone has no room for passengers in the back. I can't believe that the producers and others involved would pay no attention whatsoever to detail.

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 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.

I liked the movie except for two things. One, of the guys in the explosion scene, didn't "blow up" like he was supposed to. He fell forward about a second late. Secondly the number they used for the aircraft carrier was wrong. SSN's are submarines, not carriers. Any Navy/Military buff ( and this films target audience) probably picked up on that. It makes the director look bad as they didn't do their research . Other than that I liked it. I love the twists the film took at the end. And I can also agree somewhat with the earlier William Baldwin comment. He looked a little off in some scenes but maybe I'm just picky. Who knows. Also I thought they kept that agent's character a little too underplayed. It didn't make sense.

It seemed to me that she was just the "token woman" at times.

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!