Stealth

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.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

While you're in the theater, it's actually -- heaven help me -- pretty fun to watch.

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.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

This giddy summer extravaganza does deliver aerial thrills with eye-dazzling visuals and ear-smacking (though beautifully designed) sound.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Plays like a slapdash assemblage of the greatest hits of conspiracy-minded action cinema.

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.

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.

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."

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Flimsy and forgettable, but it does have a few worthy action and special-effects sequences.

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.

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.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

The dialogue is often drowned out by engine noise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Village Voice Ed Halter

Its action sequences, more geeky than thrilling, fail to rescue the laughable plot.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Even by the degraded standards of dim-witted summer blockbusters, this is sorry stuff.

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.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's not new. It's not interesting. I wish it would go away.