Air Strike

The Nu Image film company can often be depended on to deliver some good, mindless action in one of their straight-to-video movies, but this particular one drops the ball in EVERY aspect that you can think of. You shouldn't be surprised that there is no one in the cast that you recognize - not only was the movie apparently too cheap to hire even a faded B movie star, but the dialogue is often so bad that even a faded B movie star would think this movie would destroy their reputation. Needless to say, the unexperienced no-name cast is incredibly bad at spouting off the inane dialogue. What about action, surely there must be at the very least some good, mindless action? Nope. A lot of the footage of the flying Apache helicopters is obviously footage from the major studio movie "Firebirds", cut together with the new footage to make things absolutely unexciting. Pathetic explosions and bad use of slow motion are the icing on this turd-flavored cake. If you were a willing participant in the making of this movie, shame! Shame!

I believe this is a major accomplishment by Hollywood. The first widely distributed commercial movie directed and written entirely by 12 year olds.

The clichés are overwhelming, the editing seems to have been done by a lazy slob - especially apparent during a scene where top army brass watch a helicopter goes down on his monitor screen - who the heck was the stupid jerk holding a camera 50 feet from a battle helicopter in a jungle during combat?

Last words: if Americans really do act the way they are portrayed in this movie, it is no wonder that many hate them so much.

I happen to have read the original draft of the script and in all fairness to the screenwriter (who always get blamed when a movie is bad), the screenplay was very good even though he had to write the script around stock footage of Apache helicopter action scenes from other movies. Despite the fact that the director initially fought for the script to be the best possible in terms of story and character development, once the filmmakers went on location in Bulgaria the script was drastically changed, and coupled with bad acting choices, hack directing (one cannot blame a director when saddled with an 18 day shooting schedule and an impossible budget - considering John Woo had 192 days to shoot Hard Boiled, 35 days just for the hospital action scene alone) the result on the screen became a compromised excuse for a movie showing no one really cared. Sadly, the shell-shocked writer confided in me that he should have taken his name of the film, but unfortunately it was too late by the time he was allowed to see it. At no time during the shooting was he ever consulted regarding any of the changes, but alas, such is the fate of most Hollywood writers, powerless unless they get lucky and blessed to have their scripts directed by a writer-friendly director (i.e, the Rob Reiner, Peter Weir, Ron Howard, Edward Zwig, Martin Campbell, etc.) who not only are able to deliver the vision of a script as written, but often enhance on it with brilliant directing, casting, eliciting excellent performances from their actors, and if allowed enough time, sizzling action.

The movie is utterly predictable. The story is black and white, good guys vs. bad guys, no in between. ALL the cliches have been used in this movie, cheesy lines and all...

It's like they took some of the best lines of good classic american action movies, and made the actors recite them, one after the other... I mean, there's a scene where they're in the middle of enemy fire, and yet they stop to deliver an exchange of like 4-5 lines that completely useless to the story line, but i guess some writer thought it was "cool".

I'm surprised they didn't include the lines "I'll be back" or "Yippi-ka-yeah!", they put all the others...

and of course, all the storyline cliches were there... The woman that shows up in a squadron of men, they make fun because she's a woman, she proves herself to be just as worthy, one of the guys falls in love with her. And at the end, she even goes to rescue the guy and messes up and so our hero has to rescue her back... UGH!!

and not to forget the shot of the chopper flying home with the bright red sunset behind it and the fuel smoldering in the sun...

then the chopper returns home and they are greeted by all their army buddies, just like in Top Gun...

but then, they start chanting "USA! USA!" what was that????? i mean, even in the best, most patriotic movies they don't do that, especially since this wasn't even a WAR where the USA won against another country... They went to bust a drug lord's cartel!!! How is that a victory for the USA???? and who goes around chanting "USA! USA!", rather than hugging and shaking hands with your friends that have just come back from a dangerous mission!!!

I am watching this crap of film on TV and can not believe that some American film company can make this kind of film.Bad scenes of action,film with name "Air strike" without ANY real action war scene with helies?Even uniforms doesn't look like American!!Action is placed in imagined country name Petrovia?!What???Same animated scenes of helicopters in battle repeated several times...This film is insult for intelligence of average person.I really would like to see the budget for this film and how much money did it earned.I am still so shocked that I caught myself in serious thinking to contact the director or writer of screenplay,or even company which made this film with kindliest ask:Don't make this rubbish anymore!!!!Please!!!