Wings: Sky Force Heroes

The Colonel (Tom Skerritt) goes into hiding after an accident in the high flying team. One year later, eager newcomer Ace (Josh Duhamel) joins a ragtag flying team of obsolete planes led by Windy (Hilary Duff). Cylone (Jesse McCartney) is the arrogant best flyer. Dodo (Rob Schneider) is the wacky bird sidekick.

Is this a sequel? Is that why this movie is a mess? This is for kids who see Planes as being sophisticated. This is bad even as a direct to video kiddie movie. The writing is choppy. The characters are not appealing. The comedy isn't funny. The animation is inferior. At least, it's brightly colored and little kids may find it fun.

This film obviously plays off the film Planes. No doubt about it. The slightly anthropomorphized planes is the best example of this, but the plot I'd argue is slightly different. The only good thing here, is the soundtrack and casting choices. The latter with Hillary Duff and Rob Schneider. Some pretty big names. They got Drake Bell for the soundtrack as well (his two songs are great), though that's probably due to his connection with director Michael Symka. If Bell actually put out those songs, that'd be the only thing good to get out of this film. See, I liked A Mouse Tale, it's pretty clear Symka can direct good (in some way, more original) stories and shouldn't have to sellout to this garbage, along with everyone else involved in this project.

I vaguely remember as a child sitting in the living room of my familys trailer. Movie night. Usually we would rewatch one of our glorious dvds (I miss the format so much) but tonight was special, we were using Prime Video on the fancy smart tv we had recently purchased. The movie? Sky Force Heroes.

All I recall was the brutal death of an elderly firefighter, a young plane and his robot working out their homo-erotic living situation, the embodiment of capitalism sending a plane to hell for not wanting to mine coal 7 days a week, and some odd, odd characters.

For years, I swore I was misremembering. Certainly this movie wasnt truely real, I made it up.

But here at 5:11am, I find the exact... masterpiece.

I wont lie, I enjoyed it as a child. It was wierd.

But then again I likely mistook it for the truely amazing Planes:Fire and Rescue which is an actual movie.

Anyhow, 10/10, watch it.

As bad as the first Wings film was, being a lazy film that played things too safely and lacked overall quality, its sequel fares worse. It makes all the mistakes its predecessor did and makes more on the way, including being a blatant rip-off of the Planes sequel (the first Wings film contained very lazy confused storytelling, but wasn't anywhere near as blatant), which actually was an improvement on the first Planes film.

The only halfway decent thing here about Wings: Sky Force Heroes is the soundtrack, it's pretty catchy and fits within the film far better than the one in the first Wings did, that film's soundtrack would be alright on its own but jarred and felt like a less-fitting alternate soundtrack. Nothing else here however works. The animation is even worse than the animation in the first Wings film, the first film did have some solid character designs but the sequel didn't even have that. The colours are flat, framing and movement is stiff, the backgrounds lack polish or detail and further ruined by choppy editing, synching is sloppy and the character designs are now creepy-looking (those eyes!) and robotic, for a rip-off it doesn't even try to stay consistent with or remotely resemble the Planes sequel's character designs.

Wings: Sky Force Heroes contains a poor script too, with some embarrassingly juvenile jokes, dialogue that is even more shallow and flatter than its predecessor and like the first Wings film it plays things too safely to the extent that it's lazy and simplistic. The story lacks any kind of appeal for children and adults alike (which is an animated film or family film's biggest failure), children are likely to find it too jumpy and too muddled and adults are guaranteed to find it tedious and simplistically lazy from again playing things too safe. Because like the previous Wings film parts are very dull and go on for too long (like the scene at the fair) and then there are other parts that feel rushed and incomplete. If one is familiar with the plot of the Planes sequel, there won't be any surprises here, and it generates no tension or emotion other than boredom and frustrated anger at seeing such a lazily constructed film.

The characters here are even blander and cookie-cutter than the first Wings film, with next to no engaging personalities or development, Fred is almost as obnoxious as Dodo and T-Bone is a lamer retread of Cyclone. The voice acting gets the job done, but again it's all very undistinguished and with not that much involvement.

All in all, a very poorly done sequel to an already bad predecessor. 1/10 Bethany Cox