Movie Review Throwback: 'Fire Bird' Nicolas Cage Loves a Helicopter

If you thought silly almost parody levels of jingoistic patriotism was just a relic of 1980's action movies, you're not entirely wrong. That said, the genre of fetishistic love for American military might did linger a little ways into the 90's before we all started to fully tire of it. As evidence, here is Fire Birds, a 1990 love letter to American military might that doubles as a right wing thesis statement on how we could have won the war on drugs with super-cool, super-expensive helicopters.

The characters in Fire Birds don’t have any actual conflict. Sure, they have to try and fight the war on drugs by literally fighting a war against a drug cartel with helicopters and jet planes and whatnot, but as characters, no one in this movie has a real arc. Nicolas Cage stars in Fire Birds as Jake Preston, a hotshot helicopter pilot. His arc in Fire Birds will find Jake becoming an even more hotshot helicopter pilot. He’s just moving from being successful to even more successful.

Tommy Lee Jones co-stars in Fire Birds as hotshot flight instructor Brad Little, the master of the super-helicopter that everyone seems hot to have sex with. Not to be overly hyperbolic but even the minor romance plots of Cage and a fellow pilot played by Sean Young, or Tommy Lee Jones and his supportive wife played by Mary Ellen Trainor, don’t appear to be nearly as intimate as the moments between these men and their helicopters.

One scene has Jake Preston struggling to master ‘The Bag,’ a part of flying the super-copter that involves navigating using only instruments rather than looking out of the cockpit. It requires Jake Preston to watch two screens at the same time but one of his eyes is more dominant than the other. Oh no! So what does Jake do? Eventually he asks Brad to cure him in a comedy scene but before that he goes to the helicopter and has a heart to heart in which he whispers sweet nothings to the copter and strokes it intimately. He appears to believe that furthering his romantic connection with his helicopter will make it easier to fly it.

Brad Little’s arc is not unlike Jake Preston’s supposed arc, moving from being successful in one aspect of his life as a flight instructor to successfully returning to active duty as a helicopter pilot in combat. Fire Birds is a 90+ minute movie where no one has any real problems until we reach the combat scenes at the end. By then however, our main characters have been established as so invulnerable and perfect that there is no tension over their fate in battle.

One thing the film kind of does well is build the villain of the movie, Eric Stoller who is sort of portrayed by actor Bert Rhine. I say sort of because he’s barely in the movie. So how is this character so well built? In professional wrestling parlance, the movie uses dialogue to ‘put over’ Eric Stoller as the killing-est killer to ever kill inside a helicopter. Scene after scene features dialogue about how dangerous Stoller is and I cannot deny how effective it is as a device. It’s doubtful that any scene with Stoller actually in it could make him seem as intimidating as the dialogue does throughout scenes he’s not in.

Don’t misunderstand, you don’t come to believe for a moment that Stoller is any match for our heroes, but he has a mystique that the movie takes good advantage of to create what little tension that Fire Birds develops. So, you never think for a second that Jake is in any real danger as he confronts Stoller in the air but there is a baseline for Stoller having a small chance of winging him. Even after Stoller shoots down Brad Little you don’t fear for his fate. It’s the perfunctory beat before the big triumph.

There is no concern for Brad’s life after his crash, he’s still infallible, but it does lead to the best scene in the movie. Sean Young’s character, Billie Lee Guthrie, is the scout copter pilot, so she’s there in the battle and she is tasked with going to where Brad has crashed to see how he survived. Brad has broken both of his legs in the crash and still appears prepared to try and stand up and rejoin the fight using only a growl and the sheer force of his manliness.

Here the movie briefly bows to reality and Brad can’t just overcome two broken legs. He and Billie Lee are under attack by a cartel jet and so Brad invents a rocket launcher by instructing Billie on how to assemble one from pieces of the helicopter and a rocket he didn’t get the chance to fire in the air. Billie MacGyver’s the thing into shape and then blows up a jet from the ground using the makeshift rocket launcher. Say what you will about believability, it’s a scene even my snarky behind can’t deny is entertaining

Fire Birds is a mediocre Top Gun knock off that is interesting for having Nicolas Cage and Tommy Lee Jones having the bro-iest mentor student relationship ever. There is no tension between the two. Jones’ character is supposed to be a hard ass and yet he finds Jake Preston’s preening arrogance charming. You would assume that Jake’s arrogance is a flaw that he would have to overcome but no.

Instead, Jake’s immaturity is seen as charming and he remains the best fight helicopter pilot on the planet. Jake learns no lessons and is not expected to learn any lessons. Arrogance is his superpower and even Tommy Lee Jones, hard-ass of hard-asses, puts over the idea that Jake’s ego is an asset and not an obstacle to his self-actualization. Jake’s lack of professionalism is not an issue and it’s jarring to watch a no nonsense type like Tommy Lee Jones put up with and even appreciate the egotistical ramblings of Cage’s Jake.

Fire Birds is a bad movie. It’s not conventionally bad as in poorly made, it’s bad for how it presents itself. The movie is basically drug war propaganda. Super-cool helicopters versus evil drug selling foreigners. The jingoistic, pro-military quality of Fire Birds isn’t quite as icky as it could be, they don’t continuously roll out the American flag like other such movies, but the gist is there. And the politics-forward message serves to underline how little the movie cares about characters, performances or even story.

The carelessness of the politics of Fire Birds plays as if the movie were written by right wing war-hawks pitching the American people on the idea of fighting the drug war with the strength of the American military. Who cares about characters, the point of Fire Birds is if we wanted to, we could win the drug war with our military might, our super-sexy helicopters and our badass pilots. The movie stops only just short of the kind ‘America! F--- Yeah’ patriotism parodied in Team America: World Police.