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Stealth
EMAILPRINTColumbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Entertainment
Generally unfavorable reviews
Based on 31 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 54 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Adventure | Sci-fi | Suspense/Thriller
Written by: W.D. Richter
Directed by: Rob Cohen
Release Date:
Theatrical: July 29, 2005
DVD: November 15, 2005
Running Time: 117 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for intense action, some violence, brief strong language and innuendo
Starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard, Richard Roxburgh, Joe Morton, Ian Bliss, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach
In this action adventure, U.S. Navy pilots are part of a close-knit elite division of test pilots flying highly classified stealth fighter jets. (Sony)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: The Fast and the Furious The Skulls XXX
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Premiere Sara Brady
Stick it out through the first ten incoherent minutes or so, and Stealth is an invigorating reward, especially the tense final half-hour.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell
While you're in the theater, it's actually -- heaven help me -- pretty fun to watch.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
If you like hard bodies and hot engines, if you want to feel like you're inside a cockpit or a video game with someone else working the joystick, you'll find decent escape from the summer doldrums in Stealth.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
This giddy summer extravaganza does deliver aerial thrills with eye-dazzling visuals and ear-smacking (though beautifully designed) sound.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Bill Gallo
If the Navy is looking for splashy recruiting tools, it could do worse than Stealth, a zillion-dollar action movie stuffed with futuristic jet fighters, glamorous carrier pilots and an overload of explosive, mostly digital derring-do.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
A slick piece of summer entertainment that is counting on elaborate special effects to make its derivative, convoluted story line all but irrelevant.
Read Full Review >Empire Simon Braund
On one level, Stealth is technically breathtaking, viscerally thrilling action cinema of the highest order. On another, it is slavering, state-of-the-art war porn.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Makes a serviceable summer shoot-'em-up, but it's surprisingly trashy and rather stupid, and its efforts toward being a gripping military drama in the Tom Clancy tradition are fairly pathetic.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Joshua Katzman
While it's loaded with visceral thrills, it never rises above the level of an extended video game or an advertisement for the military.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Though Stealth's strengths are obvious -- high-tech marvels and a good cast -- so are its flaws. At its worst moments, a mad robot seems to have taken over the movie, too.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
A sort of retarded "Top Gun," Rob Cohen's Stealth revisits the world of cocky fighter pilots and war games turned real, but it has some serious moral quandaries on the brain, and too much thinking gets it into trouble.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
Even Cohen can't dull the loony romanticism of the movie’s finale and, to his credit, stages one truly spectacular bit of action midway through, when Biel bails out behind enemy lines and narrates each harrowing moment of her earthward plummet.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Stealth, a dregs-of-summer knockoff, is too ponderous and inept to serve a comparable function now, yet the film's lack of thrust may be related to an absence of conviction about its own war-is-a-videogame clichés.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Plays like a slapdash assemblage of the greatest hits of conspiracy-minded action cinema.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood's latest virtual movie, features impressive action sequences -- all created through technology -- a thin story, cardboard characters and snicker-inducing dialogue.
Read Full Review >Variety Robert Koehler
Aiming to join the Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay school of American movie war games, Stealth is just too dumb to make the grade.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Stealth is an offense against taste, intelligence and the noise pollution code -- a dumbed-down "Top Gun" crossed with the HAL 9000 plot from "2001."
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Flimsy and forgettable, but it does have a few worthy action and special-effects sequences.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer David Hiltbrand
If Stealth were a recruitment film for aircraft-carrier duty, one would be tempted to say, "Mission accomplished." As a feature film, it's a washout.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Plastic characters, chaotic camerawork, lots of things blowing up, and an incredibly dumb screenplay. In short, it represents a great time at the movies for anyone who has recently undergone a frontal lobotomy.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan
The dialogue is often drowned out by engine noise.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
What's interesting about Stealth isn't its nitwit story... No, what's interesting about this movie - and many others of its kind - is that it continues the love affair Hollywood, that hotbed of liberalism, has long had with militarism.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Brought down by repeated bursts of high absurdity.
New York Post Kyle Smith
The scene where a pilot bails out in Stealth is so over-painted with CGI that it doesn't look as real as the sequence starring Shepard that inspired it in "The Right Stuff," a movie made with model airplanes.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
It's astonishing what little impact even the most imaginatively choreographed and well-filmed aerial escapades can have when they're presented as neither an expression of a character's personality, nor in the context of a compelling mission.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) is no stranger to cornball excess but Stealth is his chef-d'oeuvre, a movie so audaciously preposterous and jingoistic it plays like a parody of the genre.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Peter Debruge
Stealth is basically the kind of movie a 13-year-old boy given an infinite budget and creative freedom might cook up between Xbox games.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Ed Halter
Its action sequences, more geeky than thrilling, fail to rescue the laughable plot.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Even by the degraded standards of dim-witted summer blockbusters, this is sorry stuff.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
For a movie to pretend, in the face of the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children directly or indirectly caused by our presence there, that we can wage war without anyone really getting hurt isn't naive, or wishful thinking, or a jim-dandy way to spend a Saturday night at the movies. It's an obscenity.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
It's not new. It's not interesting. I wish it would go away.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 4.1 (out of 10) based on 54 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Mark B. gave it a5:
Besides being the Year of the Penguin, 2005 will be remembered as the movie year in which moviegoers re-embraced the R-rated movie comedy (Yay!) and rejected the Big, Expensive Action Movie Without A Brain In Its Head (YAY!!) Michael Bay and Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) are two of the more recent auteurs of this genre; of the two, Cohen is far less offensive because of his sheer unpretentiousness; he's a bubblegum moviemaker who's secure in the knowledge that he IS one, and embraces his essential inner Bazooka Joe-ness. Just as well that Cohen's latest, about a military superplane that defies orders when it (he?) feels it (he?) has the right to or knows more than its (his?) human operators bombed in theaters, because it's actually fairly effective on DVD as a "six-pack movie": the more of the six-pack you drink the better (or at least less idiotic) it is, and it helps even more if you can get through TWO six-packs while watching it! You don't expect such offbeat talents as screenwriter W. D. Richter (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Home for the Holidays) and playwright/actor Sam Shepard to be anywhere near this (or any other Cohen film) although Shepard is actually quite good as the well-meaning but corrupt force behind the project; otherwise, Stealth comes off as an amiable cross between Blue Thunder and Top Gun without the hysterical semi-alarmism of the former or the obnoxious jingoism of the latter. Stealth's greatest strength and greatest weakness are actually one and the same: it's smart enough to ask the question of whether war should be waged as a video game or up close and personal (an issue that, in a way, got Bill Maher and Politically Incorrect thrown off ABC) but dumb enough to include so many candy-colored visuals, and take such delight in blowing stuff up real good that it undercuts its own very real, intelligent questions and becomes exactly the same thing it's criticizing. I'm sure that it's no coincidence that Cohen voice-casts the superplane to sound just like HAL the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey; in fact, I was mildly disappointed that the stealth bomber didn't get around to treating us to a chorus of "A Bicycle Built For Two".
Tonydannie gave it an8:
Is this movie Perfect? No. Is it horrible? NO! This movie was fun. Jamie Foxx a bit of a show off. The man staeling the Show is none other then Josh Lucas. This guy is going places folks. And The AI sounding like Hal from 2001, though some people hated the cliche. I enjoyed it. Give it a chance. And what is the deal with Jessica Biel's arms.? You are a chick!! Not a dude!!
SpankTheChicken gave it a10:
This film gets 10/10 if simply for Jessica Biel. Where do women as beautiful as this hide? I never see them come into the McDonalds I work at. Anyway, back on topic, the film is an average action film but she completes the movie.
P Daddy gave it an8:
Stealth is your average mindless male action film; stupid storyline, stupid plot twists, lots of eye-candy, lots of crap being blown up. It's great. But the REAL SURPRISE of the film was Jessica Biel.... my god... or should I say "oh my godess"?!?! I had to rewind the scenes of her in that blue bikini. 8-o SMOKIN! Jessica if you're reading this, contact me ... I will wipe away your every tear, and teach you how to REALLY fly. ;-)
joe somebody gave it a10:
I thought the movie was OUTSTANDING... went and saw it twice. The effects COMPLETELY blew me away from the opening scenes.
she's the one gave it a7:
This movie was mindless fun, especially as a rental. The effects were mind-blowing. The war propaganda was revealling. And Jessica Biel is the sexiest woman alive and I would gladly be the tarmac to her landing gear.
[Anonymous] gave it a7:
It's no masterpiece, but it certainly isn'tas bad as the critics say it is. The visuals blow you away, and EDI is an interesting concept. THe movie soars whenever it's in airspace, but clunky on the ground, where drivel sitcom dialogue takes over. It also fails to emphasize the more intriguing ideas brought up, like war feeling like a videogame when robotics take over, or EDI's learning capability, and goes with run-of-the-mill stuff instead. Plane design is cool, though, and it's good to see mud thown in North Korea's face. Overall, Stealth is decent high-tech entertainment, and better than a disasterous 35, but b/c it fails to take advantage of its premise properly, it won't leave much of an impact.
