Product Description

An action-adventure in which a group of air crash survivors - cast-offs from society who will never be missed - are stranded in the Mongolian desert with no hope of rescue. As they attempt to build a new plane from the wreckage of the old one, in hopes of flying back to civilization, they experience a rebirth of their own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77986 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-03-01
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, Extra tracks, Subtitled, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: English, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 113 minutes

Amazon.com
As superfluous remakes go, Flight of the Phoenix could've been better, and could've been worse. It's a passable popcorn adventure, especially for those unfamiliar with the 1965 original, which starred James Stewart, made headlines for the crash-landing death of stunt-pilot Paul Mantz, and now stands as a minor classic of its era. This flashy remake stars Dennis Quaid in Stewart's role, adds a woman to the list of plane-crash survivors, and showcases Giovanni Ribisi, who gives a cleverly eccentric performance as the model-airplane designer who proposes to rebuild a crashed cargo plane into a single-engine escape from certain death in the remote Gobi desert. Both films are essentially identical, but this remake is somehow less believable (due to shortcuts in a haphazardly written screenplay) and much more spectacular, owing to the advantage of impressive special effects. Otherwise it's a routine dose of survivalist entertainment from the director of Behind Enemy Lines, never convincing enough to be genuinely compelling, but certainly never boring. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

A fun show, just don't think too much while watching
Macho, muscles, six-packs, hot-shot attitudes, and a real cool crash scene. That's the good part.

I was really looking forward to a kind of "Junk Yard Wars" type movie that went into great detail on how the old damaged plane was torn apart and rebuilt from the scraps. But in this I was greatly disappointed. Most of the work took place off camera, and the few scenes we did see were sketchy and didn't make much sense.

Example: They are about to put one of the wings in place, a tricky task no doubt, but for some horribly unexplained reason there is a difficult job that only the company chef can perform. Why the chef? What is the job? We are never told! He is handed a big chunk of metal that looks like a huge spike and told to crawl into the fuselage, and in the process of lowering the wing into place, some chains snap and the wing slides down prematurely, seemingly crushing the chef. Then two seconds later, he emerges unharmed from behind a pile of rubble, everyone cheers, and he jokingly asks for a new pair of pants. End of scene. There are way too many scenes like this one that leave you wondering "Huh? What in the world just happened?"

Okay, so we're not going to learn, bolt-by-bolt, how the plane was rebuilt. But at least we get a good, in-depth, drama type film that goes into detail on the characters, right? Uh, sorry. Wrong.

Each of the characters falls way too easily into pre-cut stereotypes. Frank Towns (Dennis Quaid) is the Han-Soloish pilot who by default leads the group, and of course rules more by yelling and bravado then compassion and understanding. Rady (Kevork Malikyan) was meant to be the beautiful female lead, but she wasn't that beautiful and her lead wasn't very strong. All she's good for during the entire movie is one little "Hopes and Dreams" pep talk to Frank.

By far the most enjoyable character is Elliott (Giovanni Ribisi), the psychopath, self-inflated nerd who designs planes for a living. Yes, it might have been nice to know more about why this guy suddenly found himself in the middle of the Gobi desert at an unproductive oil field at the exact moment it was being shut down and the employees flown-out. But over looking that (and so many other glaring holes in the story) the reason he's fun to watch is because he's more then a paper-thin cutout whose every move is predictable. We KNOW that Frank Towns is going to go into the desert after the idiot who runs away out of desperation. We KNOW that Randy is going to give Frank the "you-can-do-it" pep talk when everything looks impossible. We KNOW all the buff guys with giant shoulders and flat abs are going to give each other lots of high-fives and dance on the wings of the plane. But Elliot keeps us guessing, and might even salvage what would have otherwise been a total loss of a movie.

All in all, it's a fun little story that's enjoyable to watch, once. But it's also full of scenes that are only half complete and so lacking in detail I can only chalk it up to laziness on the part of the screen play writer, the director, or both.

Should have left this bird alone...
It's hard to be fair to the new "Flight of the Phoenix," an adaptation of the novel by Elleston Trevor, because I keep wanting desperately to compare it to Robert Aldrich's 1965 film version, which got everything so right that I wonder why a remake was necessary. The fact that John Moore, the director of this new version, gets everything wrong in those same places makes me eager to simply make my review a list of direct comparisons.

I'll try not to, however, since every time I confront a remake, I always tell myself to judge it on its own terms. (Such advice doesn't always work, of course, especially when the new version is a pale imitation of a classic.) I will allow myself a one sentence contrast, and it is this: where the 1965 film takes its time letting the story unravel on its own, quietly but fiercely, the 2004 version opts to make everything louder, and louder, and louder, until it's convinced that the only way to get dramatic impact from such a premise is to pound loudness into the viewer.

For a while (and here's where I force myself to ignore the original movie... good luck), Moore's "Phoenix" gets things right. It shakes up the story a bit, ditching the military characters and making everyone involved employees of an oil company. Flying out of a lousy Mongolian outpost, they get slammed by a nasty sandstorm and crash in the Gobi desert, presumably somewhere just inside the China border, although nobody's too sure. The crash sequence is great stuff, nerveracking and fierce, one-upping such modern crash scenes as the one in "Cast Away." So far, so good.

With survival a prime issue, a bizarre stranger and the film's only non-oil company employee (Giovanni Ribisi) suggests they build a new plane out of the working parts remaining from the old one - a plot point that doesn't appear until much later in the 1965 version (sorry, can`t help myself), suggesting that this new version is eager to tighten things up, move things along much faster, and simply Get On With It.

It's around here that things start to go south. Uncertain of how to keep things moving in a movie in which so little happens, screenwriters Scott Frank (who should've known better) and Edward Burns (who doesn't, no surprise) keep tossing in increasingly annoying moments. It all starts with the casting of Sticky Fingaz (perhaps not his birth name?) as an eye-patched badass; his character exists merely to inject some hip-hop lingo into the proceedings. We even get a bit in which he takes over the stereo system and blares Outcast's "Hey Ya!" Good song, bad scene.

Then come the occasional explosion or electrical storm, which make for some decent action sequences but feel too forced and out of place in what's meant to be more of a character piece. And, in what evolves into an obnoxious turn of events, the arrival of a tribe of nomad baddies (arms smugglers, the story guesses), handled so expertly last time out (sorry again!), here becomes a cop out - whenever the plot gets stuck, just toss in some random nomads. (Their arrival during the final scene was so unnecessary that it borders on laughable.) By attempting to spruce things up for a modern audience, the film winds up being a series of wrong choices.

Worst of all, the filmmakers opted to dumb things down, instead of trusting the viewer to be remotely intelligent. There's an overlong explanation of the meaning of "phoenix" dropped in for all the morons in the audience, and a major revelation regarding one character is drawn out past its breaking point (the clumsiness of the scripting is only intensified by Marco Beltrami's ham-fisted musical score, which mistakes "loud" for "important").

Moore, who also made the dumb-but-enjoyable Owen Wilson actioner "Behind Enemy Lines," here tries to cram too much action into a film that doesn't need it. Fortunately, the cast rescues many a scene. Dennis Quaid, in the Jimmy Stewart role, is as magnetic a screen personality as he's ever been, and his energetic presence keeps the story plowing over its mistakes. Ribisi makes for a nice mystery man (even if the script fumbles the mystery); Miranda Otto is wonderful enough (and gorgeous enough) to make things worth watching; model-turned-actor Tyrese Gibson shows a growing promise as a star; and Hugh Laurie brings more out of his character's breakdown than the script requires, thank goodness.

Still, the cast can't fully save a dying production. This new "Phoenix" makes too many mistakes, the biggest one being the mistake of confusing "modernizing" with "dumbing down." Moore's version may interest those unfamiliar with the original movie, if only because they don't know what they're missing. But know this: you're missing one hell of a whole lot.

Great extras, mediocre film
Sadly, Flight of the Phoenix is just another duff remake. Despite massive advances in special effects and a moderately exciting last two minutes, this feels even longer than Robert Aldrich's much longer original, and the reason is pretty elementary: lack of characterisation and drama. Where Aldrich typically set his flawed protagonists at each others throats in a hostile environment that was driving them mad and dealt with the way the pilot who crashes off-course in the desert turns his guilt into anger at his passengers, this is mostly feel-good stuff, full of life lessons, spiritual slogans and far too much high fiving for any self respecting survival drama - at one point they even get down and boogie. A modicum of drama is thrown in at the last minute in the wake of the key revelation about the new plane's designer, but it's so little and so late that it totters on the edge of laughable. As a result, some good actors and Giovanni Ribisi (horribly overacting the old Hardy Kruger part minus the Nazi undertones) are stranded by committee filmmaking rather than the elements and poor piloting.

Strangely, for such a bland film, the making of documentary is surprisingly gloves off, showing director John Moore in full effing and blinding mode as he throws several fits (and he's not the only one). At least one of the extended scenes (involving a biplane) was good enough to be in the feature, and the commentary throws up the odd interesting fact amid the mutual back slapping. The result is a modest extras package that easily outshines the film.