Behind Enemy Lines Yup, another high rated movie. Not really deserving it you may say, after hearing other reviews of it. Yes, Owen Wilson needs his nose fixed, and yes, Gene Hackman really really needs to un-brand himself (well, I'm not sure about that). This movie however, I went into with pretty slim expectations. I hadn't heard that much about it, but I did see a few interesting looking trailers. It looked like a standard war type movie. And you know what? It was.

It's a pretty simple plot. Some Dude (Owen Wilson) is a navigator for a recon jet that is part of the NATO forces for the Bosnian war. Dude gets sent to take pictures. Dude gets shot down. Dude must get out alive. It's actually the plot of 99% of the other war movies out there.

First of all, if you're a plane buff of any type, or a flight sim buff, you are going to absolutely love the flying scenes. I have no frame of reference for how "accurate" it is, but it seemed more "real" than other movies. The sequence where the F-18 is shot down was absolutely amazing, worth the $9.50 CND admission in itself (IMHO). Just awsome. The rest of the film goes pretty much as expected, with a few twists and turns here and there, and lots of great action sequences.

The only thing that I found really annoying about the movie was some of the action sequences were filmed in ShakeyVision(tm), first perfected in Gladiator. Sometimes they'd go into that weird half-the-frames-and-dull-colors mode that we first saw in the first battle in Gladiator. Other times the director (John Moore) does this artistic stop action thing. I suppose it depends on if you like that sort of thing. It wasn't over-used or overly annoying, but I thought it was worth mentioning. As far as the script goes, don't expect Shakespeare here, no, not by any means. It's adequate and the people involved play pretty much their expected parts. The young buck, the old man, the bad foreigner, the evil hunters, and the even more evil stalker. My rating, 4.5/5, but then again, I'm a big plane buff, so YMMV :) Posted by Arcterex at December 03, 2001 04:49 PM