Word: firefoxers
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Dates: during 1982-1982
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...FIREFOX Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay by Alex Lasher and Wendell Wellman
There are two movies in Firefox. The first is earthbound, the kind of well-made but not very venturesome adventure picture that almost four decades of cold war have made all too familiar. The second, however, is airborne, an extravagant flight into the realm of special visual effects. For the film's producer-director-star, Clint Eastwood, it represents an attempt to arrange a shrewd encounter of a new kind, with the young audience that likes things that go whoosh in the night...
...fact that his character has a tendency to be shocked into passive reveries about his wartime experiences whenever he hears a loud noise adds suspense and humanity to the film. By the time a spy ring of Jewish Russian dissidents are inserting him into the top-secret complex where Firefox has been developed, one is well and truly ensnared in the plot...
...that is merely prelude. Even his fiery escape in the plane, under the out-of-joint nose of the Communist Party's First Secretary, first-rate though the sequence is, does not prepare one for the marvels that follow. For Firefox is a magical airplane. It is blur-fast. It is invisible to radar. It has a shield that makes it almost impervious to enemy rockets. And a pilot can direct its weaponry with his brain waves; you think bad thoughts about the other guy, and blam! you blow him right out of the sky. It is probably true...
That's one for the geopoliticians to sort out. What with the First Secretary on the radio trying to talk him down, and the second Firefox prototype trying to shoot him down, Mitchell Gant has his hands full. He is engaged in a dogfight covering thousands of square miles, and it is a thing of wit and beauty and, above all, lightning reflexes. These planes move with the blasting power of a Star Wars spaceship, and it is fun to see the future zinging and skittering through our own airspace. Eastwood's laconic professionalism plays off amusingly against...