Inferno no Céu

I suppose it must be really difficult to film with the US Air Force. So difficult, the producers of this movie clearly decamped to Hungary and shot the whole thing with MiG-29s, MiL-24 Hip helicopters and La-39 Albatrosses for the ground shots, but with Israeli F-16s, Nellis-based F-16s and Israeli Phantoms for the aerial sequences. Okay, so maybe I'm just a plane nut, but some of this stuff was sporting dirty great Russian red stars, and pilots were flying one type and getting in and out of another.

As for the tank, who knows, but I bet it was a Russian one!

This movie caught my attention when I read that both Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner, The Hitcher) and Robert Patrick (Terminator 2) were both in it, so me being a fool for low budget movies I decided to watch it.

Hauer plays deranged Captain John 'Doc' Holiday whose got a grudge with father-to-be Colonel Lee Banning, played by Robert Patrick. Captain Holiday wants revenge because of an incident back in the early 90's when Banning stopped Holiday from "having some fun" when attempting to blow up a civilian aircraft which had flown into dangerous air space...sounds a bit silly doesn't it?

Hauer's character in this movie reminded me a lot of John Ryder, the character Hauer portrayed in The Hitcher. Hauer portrays Captain Holiday with the same evil, sarcastic and resentful attitude as he did with John Ryder. While Robert Patrick gets to play the good guy...for once.

Overall, not a bad movie...felt like fellow fighter movies such as TopGun and Iron Eagle at times. Hauer still deserves better than these low-grade movies.

5/10

Several years after he was presumed dead after an "incident" in the Iraqi no-fly zone after the first Gulf War, Captain John "Doc" Holiday shows up, eager to pick up life where he left off. Former flying partner and friend Colonel Banning helps him get his old job back and the two are in action again over Bosnia as part of a NATO operation. However, even though the report of the incident looks clean, Holiday blames Banning for the years that he lost and seems not all together right in the old head there. As minor peculiarities turn into out and out barking behaviour, Banning starts to worry.

Fifteen minutes into this film and I had yet to hate this film as much as everyone else seems to have done; I had managed to ignore the made-up history and enjoy the scenes of jets flying and men going "alpha roger, I'm taking fire" etc etc. However at this point the film shifted slightly to Banning's wife and the back-story where Holiday starts to semi-stalk the family. With this the film joined the heap loads of films that already exist within this similar "man/woman appears normal but gets obsessively crazy" genre (trips off the tongue doesn't it) and it doesn't even match the low standard of the majority of them.

Let me just deal with the whole setting – that of military action in Bosnia in the mid-nineties; now I'm no expert but the whole thing was not only horribly simplistic (Americans were the good guys in the conflict and those on the ground were "bad") but it is also plain wrong. I won't linger on this too long though because facts are not the point of this film and, to be honest, if you're coming to a Rutger Hauer film expecting a history lesson then you deserve all you get. Ironically the rubbish history provides the only pieces of vague entertainment as the usual stock footage of planes and explosions and the actors inside planes against blue screens at least provides some distracting motion even if it never is exciting or involving (and potentially annoying if you pay too much attention to the identity-swapping planes). Meanwhile the usual stalker stuff plods around on the ground until, finding itself with no dramatic drive at all it simply ends with a ludicrous set piece involving tanks that have the keys left in them and a dogfight high above Bosnia. It is poor throughout and only made more annoying by just how obvious and predictable it all is.

The cast act as a clue as to how average this is going to be, given that it features two men who really don't do anything to deserve bigger projects that this. Hauer is obvious from the start to the end and never makes for an interesting character. In his defence, Patrick at least comes across as a sort of real person but even he can find little of value to use in his performance. Glasser is the damsel in distress and does nothing but that. The support cast are all average, with nothing to do but spit out the required lines in the basic required fashion.

Overall this is a very poor film that tries to milk two genres but does neither of them well at all. The Top Gun action is distracting but full of stock footage and historical stupidities; meanwhile the stalker stuff on the ground is plodding, dull and tiresomely predictable. Don't make the same mistake as me – just avoid this.

The late 1990s seems to be packed with dozens of low-budget, aerial action combat movies, in the same way that Top Gun generated a wave of wanna-be movies (e.g., "Iron Eagle," "Into The Sun," "Flight of Black Angel," etc.) after its release in the 80s. "Tactical Assault" is just one of those military movies that hits the viewer with standard issue plot and an incredibly inconsistent storyline. It almost makes the low-budget Dolph Lundgren movies look good by comparison. Basically the story of "Tactical Assault" revolves around one insane Airforce officer (Holiday) attempting to inflict his anger and revenge on another (Banning), all while a military operation rages on in Eastern Europe. It's basically the air-to-air version of "Dead Calm" combined with "Death Race 2000" in a sense. This movie is essentially insanity bordering on comedy. The funniest scene is in the end where Colonel Banning says "hey, it's just a civillian vehicle" about a dozen times to Captain Holiday who's about to 'accidentally' destroy a white, American cadillac driving haphazardly down a road. The only redeeming value to this movie is Robert Patrick, who does a surprisingly good job as the hunted Colonel Banning.

'Tactical Assault' is the first movie I've seen in which Robert Patrick plays the 'good guy'. Sigh sigh, because I started to hate it! But I'm here to talk about 'Tactical Assault'. And it wàs a disappointment! Where was the action I expected? And the cover of the video showed a Mig or F-15, whatever, but didn't they use F-16's ALL THE TIME??? Jeezes, if you make a movie about jets and such, try make it GOOD. To those who like that genre - I am amongst them - I seriously recommend to see 'Iron Eagle' once again, to forget this horrible experience. Too bad, actually, because Robert Patrick is a great actor. And I kinda expected a lot from this movie...!