Why oh why, do we have to endure 140 minutes of dross just to enjoy some fabulous flying sequences? The characters in this movie were straight out of the Hollywood Book Of Clichés - the hardened, bitter veteran, the crusading Christian, the 'nice and reasonable' black man (with no faults because that would be politically incorrect - some inverse racism here), the one with something to prove to his daddy (yuk), the one who loses his nerve, the dirty Hun who kills defenseless pilots on the ground and, of course, the all-American square jawed hero who gets the French girl. Yawn. Three stars for the aerial shots but if they'd cut half an hour off the running time, brought in a decent script writer and tidied the whole mess up, it could have been a classic.
