I have nothing against Josh Lucas. I am sure he is a perfectly fine actor. But dear lord, he has a penchant for picking hackneyed, derivative, vapid scripts. STEALTH is, sad to say, no exception. It exploits every cliche seen in every buddy-army film and adds in a dollop of sci-fi plotting that fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey will be familiar. The idea is that Josh Lucas, Jamie Foxx and, I kid you not, Jessica Biel are super-elite Navy pilots testing an ultra-cool new artificial intelligence fighter plane. Now, I have nothing against Jessica Biel, and I am sure that there are very good looking women who are elite pilots in the world, but she seriously does NOT have the gravitas to pull this role. Neither does Josh Lucas for that matter. He comes across as a sort of Tom-Cruise-lite. And as for Jamie Foxx, after RAY and COLLATERAL, this movie is a definite step back. Well, this being an attempt at a Hollywood blockbuster, Jessica Biel and Josh Lucas get it together and the AI plane develops a rogue personality. The movie then cleans up this plot mess in all too predictable fashion. To summarise, I have no elitist objections to popcorn entertainment of a sci-fi bent, but I do ask for a little more credibility and quality than is on offer here. More to the point, from the man who directed one of the most simultaneously ridiculous and brilliant action movies of recent years - XXX - I expected more.
STEALTH is on release in the US and UK. It opens in France on August 24th 2005, Germany on September 15th and Austria on September 16th.
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