Firefox : L'Arme absolue

Firefox isn't your usual Eastwood film, he's almost branching out into Star Wars territory here with this Sci-Fi heavy Cold War Spy thriller. The effects like every 80's film have dated badly but for a movie made in 1982 they are rather good. Eastwood directs himself in what is a pretty average performance by his own high standards. The majority of the cast is made up by British character actors. Warren Clarke is really good but Freddie Jones and Nigel Hawthorne are pretty hammy. Also Raiders of the Lost Ark fans can spot Ronald Lacey playing Semelovsky a Jewish scientist. The first half of the film is a spy thriller and can be pretty nail biting at times as Clint gets his papers checked at regular intervals. Also he's suffering from the same post Vietnam War disorder that John Rambo had in First Blood and that really adds to the tension. The second half is more like Star Wars and is really great stuff. So better ice up at a cold one and enjoy Firefox for what it is, Cold War entertainment at it's best.

I saw this film when it originally came out in the theaters...well over 30 years ago. I'd enjoyed it, but times have changed, I have changed and technology has changed...so do I still think it's a decent movie? Well, surprisingly, yes...it still is pretty good.

The film is a real change of pace for Clint Eastwood. In this one, he plays a Vietnam War fighter pilot who is called out of reserves to help his country. They need an excellent pilot who can think in Russian to go into the USSR for a covert operation....to steal the Firefox fighter jet!! Why is it that important? Well, because they plane can apparently do about mach 6 AND it has a new neural interface...and it's much more advanced than American fighters.

Much of the film consists of the mission getting into the Soviet Union and then to the plane. To me, this was the most interesting part. Then, the final third or so of the film is flying the plane home...and avoiding all the missiles and the other Firefox fighter. This was amazingly made for 1982 but does look a bit dated today. You can't blame anyone for this...CGI technology just has improved tremendously since then. Overall, it's an exciting film and one that is far deeper and more interesting than a standard Eastwood shoot 'em up picture. Worth seeing.

By the way, although the film is mostly extremely well made, in the first of many (too many) flashback scenes, Eastwood's Phantom II jet turns into a Thunderchief fighter-bomber. This was a pretty sloppy use of stock footage.

Suppose a specially trained Soviet pilot sneaked into this country illegally during the Cold War and, with the help of Communist spy rings, managed to impersonate an American officer, insinuate his way into Edwards AFB or Area 51, was responsible for the deaths of several American enlisted men, stole a top-secret American fighter which topped anything the Soviets could put in the air, and flew it to the USSR.

That's the plot, only vice versa. If you enjoyed the old black-and-white propaganda films about the success of the underground resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, you'll probably like this one. Instead of Nazis we have the Russians. Instead of the Gestapo we have Soviet officers but the only difference is the uniform. The Soviets are grim, beady-eyed, humorless, and ruthless. They torture prisoners and are annoyed when the prisoner happens to die. They sacrifice their own people without blinking an eye.

Instead of the heroic French or Norwegian or Czech resistance fighters we have Jewish dissidents who help the hero. They sacrifice their lives for the cause. When trapped, they shoot themselves rather than take a chance of being beaten into giving away secret information.

Instead of Errol Flynn we have -- well -- we have Clint Eastwood in one of his lesser efforts. (Flynn would have been an improvement in the role.) Clint is a top ex-pilot suffering from PTS syndrome but projecting fear is not his forte. He projects it by closing his eyes and breathing a little harder than usual. When he's shocked at something, he registers the emotion by raising his brows and opening his eyes a little wider without changing his grim, determined expression.

Nobody else in the movie really counts, but I loved Freddie Jones in the part of the British operative who explains the plan to Clint. Jones is a burly, florid man with a bush of frizzly hair like the older Dylan Thomas (a fellow Welshman) crowning his occiput. He overacts outrageously, not only chewing the furniture, but ravishing it before swallowing it. He makes Charles Laughton look like the Sphynx. His bobbing head and mellifluous irony make up for what Clint forgot to bring to the party.

The arctic scenes are nice, but the special effects are pretty clumsy. They're so bad that whenever you try to get into the plot while the plane is airborn, the cheesiness jolts you back into the realization that you're just watching a movie.

The airplane, by the way, is SO advanced that it reads minds when it carries out orders. You want it to fire a missile? Just think, "Fire a missile." But -- get this -- the equipment can only read minds that THINK IN Russian. This raises a number of interesting questions about the equipment. How about if you have a Muscovite accent? Suppose you think more like a Ukrainean than an ethnic Russian? If you simply visualize the missile being fired (or whatever) in your right cerebral hemisphere, will the thing still go? Will it go if you think in the conditional -- "If I were to think that the missile should go, then it will go"? If a missile is fired and you think, "Go, Missile, Go!", does it fire a second missile? Suppose you happen to be fixing your makeup in the rear-view mirror when you think the missile should fire -- does it blow you up? Would it fly backwards for a dyslexic pilot? If you think, "Hey, I was only kidding!", does the missile abort?

This film certainly does.

"Firefox", while definitely dated, is a good Cold War spy thriller that falls far short of being great. Clint Eastwood plays Mitchell Gant, a burned-out Vietnam fighter pilot who's enlisted to steal a high-tech, heavily-armed, stealth Soviet fighter plane right out of its Siberian hangar. The first half of the film is a John le Carre type thriller – Clint sneaking into Moscow, assuming a Soviet pilot's identity, and making his way to the experimental Firefox fighter craft. The second half, when he climbs into the cockpit of the Firefox, is where the real fun begins.

While entertaining, the film isn't particularly great – apart from Clint's gritty performance as Mitchell Gant, none of the other actors manage to stand out in any way. The jet fighter sequences also haven't stood the test of time – they looked great in the Eighties, but now they just look dated and unrealistic. Certain scenes in the film are little more than padding, buying breathing room between action scenes and doing little else. There's enough tension and action scattered throughout the film to make `Firefox' fun, but there's much better Cold War movies than this (`The Russia House' and `The Hunt for Red October' easily come to mind), and there's certainly much better Clint Eastwood movies than this. B-/C+

... and by my count this line was spoken at least seven times here.

This is a cold war thriller from Clint Eastwood about a Vietnam vet fighter pilot sent undercover and across the iron curtain to steal a new Soviet super-plane. The first two-thirds of the film are a treat, with a lot of tense scenes of Clint and his sympathetic Russian contacts narrowly escaping capture. The last section is where the film loses steam, with a lot of repetitious, dated fx shots of the jet in action.

Warren Clarke is memorable as Clint's chief contact. Also featured are Freddie Jones, Ronald Lacey, Nigel Hawthorne, and Kenneth Colley. As you may have noticed, there are no women listed; this is the rare film with no substantial female presence at all. The real star, though, other than Clint, is the fictional MiG31 "Firefox" fighter jet, invisible to radar, capable of Mach 6 speeds as well as full nuclear armament. The film also borders on science fiction with the jet's thought-controlled weapon systems.

It is a 50/50 proposition as to whether you will like this one. For me it was fun to see Eastwood stretch his directorial skills in a different direction, and even more fun if you actually remember the cold war...or were even alive during the cold war for that matter.