Firefox (1982)

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Starring Clint Eastwood, Warren Clarke, Nigel Hawthorne, Stefan Schnabel, Kenneth Colley, David Huffman, Klaus Löwitsch, Clive Merrison, Freddie Jones, Ronald Lacey, Thomass Hill, Kai Wulff, Dimitra Arliss, Wolf Kahler. [PG]

Not to be confused with a film adaptation of the Mozilla web browser application (if there can be movies based on emojis and Candy Land, why not??), this Cold War espionage thriller sends American pilot and former POW Eastwood into the Soviet Union to locate and steal an advanced supersonic fighter jet (code name: Firefox) that is invisible to radar and has thought-controlled weapons systems. Pretty standard stuff most of the way, hampered by sluggish pacing and too many cutaways without the dramatic interest to back them up; even the final act, with Eastwood piloting the experimental plane to safety, keeps getting interrupted by arguments among the Russian brass on how to stop him. The jet is an impressive piece of hardware, and there’s lots of visual excitement seeing the POV shots of it hurtling through valleys and over mountains, erupting surging walls of water in its wake, but the special effects during those sequences are uneven and Eastwood talking to the computer (himself, really) doesn’t exactly get the hairs on the back of the neck standing on end. The star is his usual terse and laconic self, while most of the supporting cast (Clarke, Schnabel, and Jones especially) tend to ham it up at every opportunity. Based off a book by Craig Thomas.

57/100