Fire Birds

Directed by David Green, Fire Birds follows a grizzled flight instructor (Tommy Lee Jones’ Brad Little) as he attempts to ready several pilots, including Nicolas Cage’s Jake Preston, for overseas battle. Filmmaker Green, armed with Paul F. Edwards and Nick Thiel’s screenplay, delivers a familiar yet watchable actioner that benefits from its engaging performances and smattering of compelling set-pieces, as, in terms of the former, Green elicits an entertainingly larger-than-life turn from Cage that goes a long way towards smoothing over the narrative’s bumps and lulls – with the actor generally infusing even the most basic of sequences with a less-than-subtle bent that proves impossible to resist (eg Jake repeatedly shouts “I am the greatest!” during a routine training exercise). There’s little doubt, though, that Fire Birds‘ overall impact is dulled significantly by a midsection suffused with one training sequence after another (ie it’s just excessive past a certain point), which, despite the inclusion of a few attention-grabbing digressions (eg Jake attempts to fix his eye-dominance problem by driving with a periscope affixed to his head), ultimately prevents the action-packed climax from packing the visceral punch that Green has surely intended – with the final result a decent-enough endeavor that would hardly be worth mentioning were it not for Cage’s predictably mesmerizing efforts (eg Jake karate kicks the air out of frustration).

**1/2 out of ****