“Smuggling Clint Eastwood into Russia to steal a Soviet jet because he speaks Russian is about as believable as Brad Pitt’s Italian in Inglourious Basterds—yet somehow, it still works.”
Firefox is an action and techno-thriller film released in 1982, directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Alex Lasker and Wendell Wellman, and starring Clint Eastwood as Mitchell Gant alongside Freddie Jones as Kenneth Aubrey. The Soviets have developed a revolutionary new jet fighter called the “Firefox.” Worried that the jet will be used as a first-strike weapon... as there are rumors that it is undetectable by radar... the British send ex-Vietnam War pilot Mitchell Gant on a covert mission into the Soviet Union to steal it. It is ultimately about the government pulling a burned-out, highly stressed Vietnam war pilot out of retirement for a completely insane Cold War mission. He has to secretly sneak into Russia, link up with a network of local spies, and literally steal their brand-new, top-secret fighter jet right out from under their noses... all because the plane is so advanced it can be controlled entirely by the pilot’s thoughts.
Moving right along on my watch-a-thon of Clint Eastwood-directed films, we are now traveling into Cold War spy territory, which I find really interesting. I feel like I used to look at the Cold War and its spies as boring, but it really was a crazy time in our history. I’m beginning to appreciate the era more and more, and thrusting Clint Eastwood undercover into the Soviet Union to steal a stealth plane actually sounds like a lot of fun... and it is.
I need to stop looking at the critical reception for these movies because my experience rarely lines up with them. For instance, The Outlaw Josey Wales is supposed to be some kind of masterpiece of Western cinema, and I just found that to be... fine. In general, the critical reception for Firefox is honestly not that great. Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at around 40% rotten or something, but honestly, I had a lot of fun with this one. I recognize that, yes... it has some serious logical fallacies, but they are fallacies you ultimately forgive because it’s Clint Eastwood doing his thing.
So, let’s first talk about the stealth jet aspect of the film. This movie was released nearly a decade before the government officially revealed to the public that we had stealth capabilities for our military aircraft. Technically, it was also released right around the time real stealth jets were being tested for the very first time under total secrecy. Firefox was the first movie to really show a stealth plane in a film that was at least halfway based in science rather than pure science fiction, like Star Trek or Wonder Woman’s invisible plane. All of that is great.
The aspect in the movie that is very science-fiction, however, is that all you have to do is think to control the plane and shoot missiles. I don’t know why they included that... maybe to cement the idea that it’s such futuristic tech. And you can’t just think in general; you have to think... in Russian. That is why they need Clint Eastwood’s character: because he can speak Russian.
Clint Eastwood’s character is introduced as someone with, essentially, PTSD from the Vietnam War. Right off the bat, they are at least attempting to provide his character with some depth and development. This PTSD follows him every step of the way and actually gets him into some really precarious positions, so I did appreciate that. But the more you actually THINK about what this movie is about, the more you have to have a good laugh.
Smuggling someone like Clint Eastwood into Russia to steal a Soviet Union plane is one thing, but doing it because he speaks Russian is about as believable as Brad Pitt’s Italian in Inglourious Basterds. He doesn’t even attempt an accent, and for the most part, he doesn’t even attempt to speak the language! He speaks English 99.99999% of the time. Even when he’s in the plane and he’s supposed to be controlling it with Russian thoughts, he’s speaking English. He’d be caught so fast in real life. But again, this IS Clint Eastwood, and the things you look past and forgive in the film really come down to how much you like him as an actor... and I’ll admit it does work. Like I said in the beginning, though... you have to suspend your disbelief to get into what the film is trying to do, because it IS silly and nonsensical. However... it IS fun.
Now, at least half of the film takes place after Clint gets into the plane and is dodging all of these attacks from the enemy. That’s cool in theory, but obviously in 1982, we had a real lack of ability when it came to making flights like this look... real? You can clearly tell what’s composite-generated and digitally placed over a video of clouds and all this. Again, more silliness, but this is the stuff I found more difficult to actually forgive because it pulled me right out of the experience. I don’t think half of the film should have been dedicated to this. I think this sequence should have been... 15 to 20 minutes tops, not an hour. So, pacing-wise, I do think it struggles a bit once this happens. That’s unfortunate, because I feel like what they were going for was to make THIS part of the movie the most exciting, and it just wasn’t.
Unbiased/Technical Score: 33/50 (66%)
Biased/Entertainment Score: 35/50 (70%)
Total Combined Score: 68/100 (68%) | Letterboxd: 3.5/5
Identical Twin Score: The Eiger Sanction (another Eastwood film sharing the exact same biased, unbiased, and total score).