Flyboys

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

A highly enjoyable programmer about those brave young men and their rickety flying machines.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

As imaginatively as some of them are staged, the action scenes are never authentically gripping. This seems to be the hidden handicap of our new digital filmmaking era in which all big action sequences are generated in the computer and look vaguely like cartoons.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

While the aerial dogfights are handsome and apparently historically accurate, right down to the tracer bullets that leave graceful, crisscrossing trails in the clouds, they have a video-game feel.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The movie's straightforward and ingratiating, and as pretty-boy history lessons go, it's a lot less obnoxious than "Pearl Harbor."

Premiere Glenn Kenny

Part of what makes these kind of war movies such cinematic comfort food (aside from the moral certainty they strive to convey) is their familiarity. But I wonder if said familiarity is what compels contemporary filmmakers to overstuff the material -- Flyboys is a good two hours and 20 minutes.

The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden

A decidedly old-fashioned war film that reaches for epic sweep but is often bogged down in cliched drama and two-dimensional characters.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Lovingly and knowledgeably made by director Tony Bill, who got his pilot's license as a teenager, pic nonetheless has a lightweight, airbrushed feel; despite the brutal dogfights and inevitable deaths, there's little gravity or resonance.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

There's something almost perversely old-fashioned about Flyboys.

The New York Times Nathan Lee

Despite its empty head and arduous length, Flyboys is ever so nice, in the manner of a Norman Rockwell illustration. The director, Tony Bill, may not be a philosopher but he is a gentleman, moving things along with a tidy, well-mannered hand. In another context, such politesse might feel tonic. Given the state of things, it’s nearly toxic.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Just about everything in the video-gamey World War I picture Flyboys rings false, although the planes certainly are terrific.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

While the music slops and churns and the ground-level bathos rises, the aerial stuff is occasionally stirring.

Village Voice Bill Gallo

Here is the War to End All Wars seen from on high--as it was way back when, in "Wings" or the Howard Hughes "Hell's Angels"--a world apart from the grim, futile slaughterhouses of Verdun and the Marne. Among these combatants, you won't find much "All Quiet on the Western Front"–style despair, and the paths of glory are unsullied by doubt or disillusionment.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Flyboys is so schematic and contrived, you can anticipate exactly what scene is going to come next, and who will be the next to die in combat, once you latch onto the structure of the script, which has all the inventiveness and ingenuity of a flow chart.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Shot like a Disney period piece (prettily, with spiffy props, shiny vintage vehicles, and costumes just back from the cleaners), Flyboys introduces its squadron the old-fashioned way: with character-establishing setups.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

The aerial dogfights are thrilling, but the script seems to have been written by Snoopy.

San Francisco Examiner Walter Addiego

Besides some fine dogfight sequences, it often feels threadbare, just an exercise in recycling.

Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirshling

This is a lost opportunity on an epic scale. The actors are so styled and the dogfights so drippy with CG that, as a period piece, the movie almost looks like it's set in the future.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

While director Bill nails the sheer spectacle of squads of SPADs dovetailing in flames into the wide blue yonder, the earthbound action (much as it was in another sputtering epic, Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor") is strictly laissez faire.

New York Post Kyle Smith

The computer-generated flying effects are the only reason to see the movie, but at some point somebody left the computer on too long, so it went ahead and spat out the script.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Flyboys doesn't succeed as a wartime adventure story or as a period romance. Even the special effects, set in a historical context, are too ho-hum to save this over-long and tedious film.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Forget any hope of raffish adventure if you think of seeing Flyboys.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Kate Taylor

The creators of Flyboys know no image too clichéd, no narrative convention too exhausted and no psychological motivation too pat that it can't do service.