Metascore
35 out of 100

Generally unfavorable - based on 31 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 31
  2. Negative: 15 out of 31
  1. Reviewed by: Sara Brady
    75
    Stick it out through the first ten incoherent minutes or so, and Stealth is an invigorating reward, especially the tense final half-hour.
  2. While you're in the theater, it's actually -- heaven help me -- pretty fun to watch.
  3. 63
    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.
  4. This giddy summer extravaganza does deliver aerial thrills with eye-dazzling visuals and ear-smacking (though beautifully designed) sound.
  5. Reviewed by: Simon Braund
    60
    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.
  6. 60
    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.
  7. A slick piece of summer entertainment that is counting on elaborate special effects to make its derivative, convoluted story line all but irrelevant.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 50
    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.
  11. 50
    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.
  12. Reviewed by: Joshua Katzman
    50
    While it's loaded with visceral thrills, it never rises above the level of an extended video game or an advertisement for the military.
  13. 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.
  14. Hollywood's latest virtual movie, features impressive action sequences -- all created through technology -- a thin story, cardboard characters and snicker-inducing dialogue.
  15. 40
    Plays like a slapdash assemblage of the greatest hits of conspiracy-minded action cinema.
  16. Reviewed by: Robert Koehler
    40
    Aiming to join the Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay school of American movie war games, Stealth is just too dumb to make the grade.
  17. 38
    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."
  18. Flimsy and forgettable, but it does have a few worthy action and special-effects sequences.
  19. 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.
  20. 38
    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.
  21. 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.
  22. Brought down by repeated bursts of high absurdity.
  23. The dialogue is often drowned out by engine noise.
  24. 25
    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.
  25. Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    25
    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.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. 20
    Even by the degraded standards of dim-witted summer blockbusters, this is sorry stuff.
  29. Reviewed by: Ed Halter
    20
    Its action sequences, more geeky than thrilling, fail to rescue the laughable plot.
  30. Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    12
    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.
  31. It's not new. It's not interesting. I wish it would go away.
User Score

Mixed or average reviews- based on 60 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 15 out of 39
  2. Negative: 22 out of 39
  1. This movie reminds me of why you should check the ratings before you watch some random movie. It's not just unworthy of paying money to see it, it's not even worth the time to watch it. I literally would have preferred to do chores than watch this, and I'm lazy. This was so stupid, so cliché, it's just worthless. The action wasn't even thrilling, and everything else about it was cliché or stupid. Stealth is a movie you shouldn't even bother watching. Full Review »
  2. MarkB.
    5
    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". Full Review »
  3. Tonydannie
    8
    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!! Full Review »