""Flyboys"" spends 140 minutes pretending to be a serious war film. Although it's based on a true story from World War I, it's not really about real people or heroism. It's a vehicle for James Franco to look cute, fall in love and have adventures. The deepest line of dialogue comes from an ace pilot in Franco's unit: ""You have to find your own meaning in this war."" Probably true, but an unimpressive insight in a movie this dim-witted.
The title refers to the young American volunteer fighter pilots assigned to the French-commanded Escadrille Lafayette unit. Rawlings (Franco) is the most determined among them; fleeing his Texas hometown to escape assault charges, he is unfazed when told pilots' life expectancies are three to six weeks. Others in his unit include Beagle, a suspected German spy; Skinner, an African-American allegiant to France for its civil rights progress; Porter, a rich dropout whose father forced him to volunteer; and Cassidy, an ace with twenty kills.
These are hardly a band of brothers. The screenplay does not give the pilots anything resembling realistic wartime interaction. One yearns for Giovanni Ribisi's scared, heartfelt monologue in ""Saving Private Ryan""—or Michael J. Fox's piercing statement on morality in ""Casualties of War."" The pilots in ""Flyboys"" talk as if they went to war with a list of clichAcs to say to each other. There is no room for good performances in ""Flyboys,"" because there are no real characters to be portrayed.
Interspersed throughout the film is a banal love story between Rawlings and a French girl who takes care of him after his plane makes a crash landing. She speaks no English and he speaks no French, and yet they fall in love after sharing a few tender moments. There's the obligatory scene where he takes her up in his airplane, and until now it was thought impossible that a filmmaker could draw inspiration from ""Pearl Harbor.""
The battle scenes themselves are unremarkable. Each is more boring than the last, and there is never a sense of wonder. Since the computerization of the airplanes is obvious, it doesn't feel like these characters are in any real danger. A major plot point is how unprepared the volunteers of Escadrille Lafayette were for the stress of air combat, but these battles are approached with all the tension of a video game. When fighters are killed, one almost expects the words ""Game Over"" to appear on the screen.
All of this is punctuated by a pervasive dullness. The makers of ""Flyboys"" financed the film themselves, without studio backing. There were numerous production problems, including an accident which scrapped the possibility of using real planes in the action sequences. All this implies that director Tony Bill and his producers were determined to get the film made at any cost. Shouldn't there then be evidence of this passion onscreen? ""Flyboys"" has nothing resembling a reckless excitement. The explanation: At some point making the film must have become as boring as watching it.
