Sky Bandits

As others have noted, this movie is filled with bad effects, flat acting and any number of other problems. Yet there are many moments where it seems like the movie might work. But just when things start to get rolling, the timing goes out and suddenly its the most boring thing you've seen.

Consider the opening. It starts with a bunch of fast action scenes of our heroic duo blowing up banks one after another in quick succession. One of these consists of nothing more than throwing a bundle of dynamite in the door, causing the entire building to explode into matchsticks. Dumb, but fun.

And then for no reason I'll ever understand, the next heist is shown in excruciating detail... this time they're drilling holes into the safe and setting up this elaborate system for pouring in nitro. I don't know how they managed to do it, but they dragged this scene on for minute after minute of excruciating nothingness as the two banter on mindlessly, setting themselves up all-too-obviously to get caught. The entire movie dies right there, the pace just kills.

And it keeps doing this, over and over. Then we're in Europe, where there's a bunch of fast scenes while they shoot down a bomber with their pistols and then fly off. An excruciating scene follows. And again, and again and AGAIN. Over and over it looks like they just might pull it off and save it, only to bore you to death seconds later.

Bizarre!

My review was written in October 1986 after watching the film at a Times Square screening room.

"Sky Bandits" misfires on all cylinders. Meant as a rollicking World War I adventure, mishmash of a feature is missing a plotoline. Touted as the most expensive (production budget pegged at $18,000,000), indie British film ever, pic doesn't deliver the expected values on screen and has a no-name cast that won'[t help it attract attention domestically or overseas. Distrib Galaxy International has unwisely opted for a national saturation release.

Originally titled "Gunbus" (after the small fighter planes featured), Thom Keyes' unsatisfactory screenplay opens with a reel of two young heroes (Scott McGinnis and Jeff Osterhage) making like Butch Cassidy & Sundance (the early days, that is) in montages of bank robberies. Switch this pointless material headed nowhere the boys are suddenly sent to France to fight in the Great War against the dreaded hun.

Misadventures for the duo include a gam of one upmanship with haughty British flyers, a little sack time with two pretty mademoiselles (Valerie Steffen, Ingrid Held) and a mission to destroy a vast Graf Zeppelin the Germans are using for bombing runs. With dogfighter prowess picked up instantly (heroes decide to try piloting biplanes on a dare), they save the day and are subsequently back in the west blowing up banks quicker than you can say "Blue Max".

Film plods along episodically wit no forward momentum to the sotry: every once in a while there is a dissolve and a new scene has beguyn. Since Keyes' script lacks humor, the boring repartee between the two wooden heroes is downright deadly. What producer Richard Herland and director Zoran Perisic deliver is a succession of pretty but very fake-looking model plane shots or process shnots. The excitement of aerial dogfights, which have entertained audiences in hundreds of war films and served as the inspiration for "Star Wars" is missing.

Cast is tgruly awful, with the only familiar actor, Ronald Lacey, hamming it up and American leads McGinnis and Osterhage lacking the charisma this sort of yarn calls for. Production, including David Watkin's photography, is technically adequate but wholly lacking in verisimilitude. For all the money spent, it would have been more convincing to use stock footage left over from "Hell's Angels" The comic book approach doesn't work.

With Rank, ITC and Thorn EMI as recent examples, experienced British producers have learned how difficult it is to try and compete with the Americans via big-budget projects; modest efforts like "Gregory's Girl" and "My Beautiful Laundrette" have been more successful. "Sky Bandits" will undoubtedly reinforce this conventional wisdom.

GUNBUS is a fun little British WW1 film featuring a couple of imported American leads who through various rather unbelievable plot twists end up joining a British suicide squadron in their plans to bring down a massive German airship. It starts out as a rather cheesy western in which the central twosome dynamite about a billion banks before they're suddenly in France and ready for action.

This rarely-seen film is rather inconsistent and seems to be suffering from choppy editing and huge budgetary constraints; the ending in particular is extraordinarily abrupt and just cuts to another random scene in an unappealing way. Saying that, I did get a kick out of GUNBUS, enjoying it in much the same way I enjoyed the similarly flawed BIGGLES made during the same era.

Scott McGinnis and Jeff Osterhage verge on the irritating rather than charismatic but there's a solid British cast to back them up, including the reliable Miles Anderson and Rodney himself, Nicholas Lyndhurst. Ronald Lacey is underutilised as a friendly German character. The movie was directed by Zoran Perisic, the Yugoslavian special effects guy who worked on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and SUPERMAN, and I suspect that directing wasn't really his calling. Still, there's plentiful action here, and the many aerial combat sequences, although cheesy, are good natured and most of all fun.

I have not seen this film since its theatrical release, but for some reason I was reminded of it recently while viewing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). Both films had interesting concepts that made attempts at historical juxtaposition; both had big budgets for action sequences and special effects; both were ultimate failures. One memorable scene that did show some originality was a depiction of a World War I German "Gotha bomber" as much, much bigger that the real thing, complete with a spiral staircase, a large wheel as on an ocean-going vessel, and a formally-uniformed commanding officer standing on the bridge. I hope that whoever imagined this did go on to bigger and better things.

Gunbus was the UK title of this film. Some trench scenes were filmed at Marston Mortaine in Bedfordshire (Disused LBC clay pits). I know this because I was an extra for some scenes - my one and only venture into the film world. But I was a mere dot on the screen and absolve myself of any responsibility for this dire, almost unwatchable attempt at comedy. 18 million dollars? Well, the catering was good.