Flight of the Intruder

"Flight of the Intruder" is yet another Vietnam film, this time attempting to shape a story that has Americans as winners rather than losers.

The first half is a rousing, John Wayne-style male-bonding epic, with Danny Glover commanding Navy pilots on an aircraft carrier who get to drop bombs on unimportant targets toward the end of the war, occasionally losing buddies to Viet Cong anti-aircraft guns. (There's even a brief shore-leave romance with war widow Rosanna Arquette.)

The focus is on Brad Johnson (the young, naive firefighting pilot in "Always") as a disillusioned pilot reluctantly teamed with Willem Dafoe, who comes aboard with a shady past and a reputation for being rather wild-eyed.

Then, about halfway through the film, there is a dramatic shift in tone as Johnson and Dafoe cook up a scheme to bomb Hanoi — unbeknownst to their commanding officer, of course. What follows is an overwrought series of events that evolve from this illegal vigilante action, all of which seem, to say the least, unlikely. The film culminates with a hurrah as President Richard M. Nixon orders unrestricted bombing of Hanoi.

This is a dubious idea for fiction at any time, but perhaps especially right now.

The film might be more palatable in the hands of a more subtle filmmaker, but John Milius, who gave us the same strident tone in "Red Dawn" and "Farewell to the King," hammers his message home between action scenes that seem more like "Star Wars" than "Top Gun." It must be said, however, that those battle sequences, and the scenes aboard the carrier, are visually stunning.

One question, once more in the area of anachronisms — did the Navy have videocassette tape players instead of film projectors in 1972?

"Flight of the Intruder" is rated PG-13 for violence, profanity, vulgarity and implied sex.