Hyper Sonic

It didn't even take 10 wasted minutes of my life to discover this hideous excuse for a film is less entertaining than watching paint dry. Perhaps to a totally stoned 4th grader it would be marginally interesting but then so would a trail of ants on the floor. No part of this debacle is even close to real or realistic. But I sure would like to get some of those binoculars that let people watch every part of an intercontinental air race. It never ceases to amaze me that movie makers who want to have airplanes in their film only rarely manage to dig up an actual pilot, or engineer or SOMEONE who isn't a total doofus, for technical advise. Another hard to believe fact is that they have the nerve to charge admission to crap like this. Boo, hiss.

During the opening credits, we see two young boys playing with toy airplanes.

In the next scene, Grant Irvine, one of those boys, is in an airplane race. It is dangerous to refuel in the situation he is in, but he thinks it is more important to win than to be careful.

Several people die as a result of the explosion, including some spectators.

There is an investigation in which TV executive Chris Bannon doesn't tell the truth, and airplane racing is ended for the next four years.

Four years later, there is racing again. And Bannon cares more about ratings than safety. After all, the rebroadcasts of that incident four years earlier got some of the best ratings the NTC network has ever seen.

Grant can't race (or can he? We'll find out), but his brother Kevin (apparently the other boy from the opening credits) can. Grant can be the crew chief. Kevin flew in combat against Albanians, but despite his medals, his brother (who was in Desert Storm) doesn't see that war as worthy of respect. Both brothers appear interested in Trina, the pretty refueling pilot. Diedrich is a tough, competitive German pilot who reminds me of Drago in "Rocky IV".

It's an exciting event watched by millions, and covered by DNN, PGD and MATV as well as NTC. And in this world, ratings information is available immediately. Furthermore, there is plenty of action to generate ratings. Bannon, of course, wants the pilots to be as reckless as possible so that maybe there will be a crash or something.

It's funny to watch the poor people of Vladivostok (or whatever city that really is) reacting to the reckless pilots. I didn't know they had such pretty blonde women there. Hey, who cares, people in the movie say--it's Vladivostok.

There is an amazing moral dilemma which is resolved in a way one might not expect. Perhaps some people here care about others more than winning.

This isn't really my kind of movie, but I couldn't help but find the racing scenes exciting. Before the second race, a lot of scenes explained what was happening or getting ready to happen, but these wouldn't necessarily interest those who came here for action.

I'm no expert, but it certainly looked like people knew what they were doing as they tried to make the action realistic. Those who know planes might have a different opinion. Two major weaknesses: the sound effects people relied heavily on Hanna Barbera (a good thing for someone like me who grew up on those cartoons), and the planes went all the way across Africa and Asia in no time flat, as if they used "Star Trek" worm holes or something. And I doubt medical information was accurate. There's no way someone could recover like that without a hospital and real doctors.

No one watches a movie like this for the acting. I thought Adam Baldwin was particularly weak in some scenes. His character sounded knowledgeable as he did part of the race announcing for NTC, but he was no Jim McKay. He was, of course, an executive, so this may have been all right. But his best moments seemed to be limited to those exciting scenes where something dangerous was likely to generate ratings. He had a great poker face at one point where I thought he was delivering bad news--he wasn't.

It's a B movie. Something exciting to watch if that's your style and you're not picky.

This movie is terrible, but it's so terrible that in some ways it's funny. The movie is very low budget and no one did their homework so if you have ever vaguely met anyone in the air force or if you are a pilot there will be some funny stuff to laugh at. I can't decide though if it's funny or embarrassing when they try to talk shop aviation, it's painful and they try to do it through the whole movie. I also love how there are these Air Force characters that show up a few times and they are all wearing the same Halloween Senior Airman uniform. I rolled over laughing when one of them says "Hello Major!" Anyway this movie makes no sense. Wardrobe makes no sense, dialog makes no sense, the technical stuff makes no sense. Oh and for some reason the CG guy had a thing for the Eurofighter Typhoon because it plays all of the planes. The end which I'm not going to elaborate on makes no sense, you should watch it just to experience the feeling of a writer stepping on the logic center of your brain for a few minutes.

So in short if you want to waste some time there are better bad aviation movies, go watch one of the ones with dinosaurs.

Check this out if you like movies that are so bad they're good. If you watch it with that in mind, it's pretty funny and will crack you up. It's got awful cgi, wailing guitar where it doesn't belong, a weird plot about race jet drivers (?), bad actors delivering words they've clearly never said in their lives, and Johnny Lawrence from cobra kai.

It almost gives off death race 2000 vibes (but without the political allegories) even though there's not much violence or death, so if you're a fan that one check this out. I don't think will become a midnight movie classic or anything, but if you find the dvd for $1 like I did, pick it up and have a blast with others who would appreciate such a POS!

The plot, special effects, and any similarity to current day USAF capabilities & operations was so far off-base that I didn't even notice the poor editing job that they previous reviewer mentioned.

I only suffered through the first half-hour of the movie before I had to put myself out of my misery & turn off the TV.

Clearly this was a low-budget movie, and not only did the USAF/DOD run away from any agreement to provide a liaison for basic technical accuracy, but the producer apparently didn't bother to have ANY adviser for military 'culture' or aviation matters.

They couldn't even track down some surplus fighter pilot helmets & oxygen mask assemblies -- what they depicted as O2 masks were actually some modified SCUBA diver breathing regulators!