User Reviews

Some films are good, some are so bad they are funny, then there is this film. There is a circle of hell reserved just for producers of this type of formulaic, hammy-acted, badly scripted and badly filmed detritus.

In no particular order, my favourite moments were:

* Garret picking up two AK47s and then walking slowly, shooting from the hip with both weapons and wiping out scores of enemies who are all camouflaged and taking cover.

* The guy who, when a building explodes somewhere near him, appears to jump pointlessly out of his watchtower, crying out. I don't know why he was wearing camouflage paint on his face when he was in a watchtower, maybe it was to hide the fact that it was Christiano Ronaldo brought in specially for the theatrical dive.

* The stock footage of helicopters firing missiles used repeatedly, just different helicopters from the ones they showed taking off.

* Garret shooting someone and saying "suck on this". Really?

* Garret and Charlie engaging in phone sex over the radio ("I've got wood") while a team of Rangers is trying to extract him from a hot zone.

My biggest complaints, though, are reserved for IMDb. Why has the site allowed people to rate it more than 1? The average rating of 2.5 is far, far too high. In fact, why does IMDb have a minimum rating of 1 star? To give this 1 star is like polishing a turd.

Sometimes movies about the military are so bad it makes me want to put on a turban, this is one of them. Air Strike is a story of how a US Air Force team loses two great pilots on a mission and spends the rest of the movie bombing the shyt out of the drug cartel responsible.

Every cliché you can think of is in this movie. Guy's brother dies so he comes out of retirement to take his place (even though he hasn't flown in years and can just simply hop a plane) and avenge him, female pilot gets heckled for being a female and calls them on it, guy falls in love with female and everyone sees it coming, and my favorite....guy breaks out of prison and proceeds to take out 30 guys single handedly armed with barely anything.

The movie has some decent flight patterns from the different type of planes, but the overall part is so horrible that not even the actual air strikes within the movie could wake the crowd up. Lastly, I din't know knocking off drug cartels was a major accomplishment, so why did they chant USA! USA! at the end? I don't see police officers chanting USA after giving someone a speeding ticket. That mission was purely personal and no one was going to read about it so why make it seemed like they dropped the A bomb on Hiroshima?

There are no highlights to this movie, that's how bad it is....1 out of 10

I love bad movies, and the moment the babe bad-ass pilot arrived, with a nickname like "Charlie", I smelled a pearl.

The stock shots from old Pentagon tapes don't mix with the scenery, the Americans act like lapdogs the the "Petrovian" military commander... "I give the orders, you obey" but I can understand. The guy is a cheap Dr Strangelove, wheelchair and cigarettes included.

Also highly-trained, expensively-trained pilots join ground missions, and if someone says no the bad-ass babe pilot says "If you don't allow me I'll ask my father, General whatever". Yeah, right. US Army, just like Junior High.

The hero, of course, takes a Rocky Balboa-grade beating, but is ready to beat the two main villains, with his bare hands. Oh, they do that in a cage, in the middle of their Evil Compound, but NOBODY is watching. Of course the hero does not kill the villain, who killed his brother (great and original plot device) and flees.

Best part is: The hero is escaping, after a few "let's blow the villain's drug stash" and "let's blow the villain American dollars stash". Yes, now I know the "writer" watched Lethal Weapon. He shots a few thousand henchmen, direct from Imperial Troopers Marksman School. After the last two, he run out of bullets. He IGNORES the 1644 guns dropped around the massacre area, pulls a biiiig fracking machete, and starts to slaughter the other 544 remaining henchmen. Those are helpful enough to simply run towards the hero, holding their Ak-47s. I know, even the things that grown in my bellybutton would simply stay away and hose down the guy with hot lead, but he's the hero, come on.

Did I told you the hot bad-ass babe pilot goes to his rescue and of course is captured by the villain #2, in a split-second...

Oh, the villain killed HER brother too.

After a Mexican stand-off between a guy holding a hot bad-ass babe pilot (and a pistol) and a guy 10 meters away holding a big knife, the villain #2 makes the hero drop the knife. He does, but holds a small cute kitchen knife on his back. The villain #2 (oh, surprise!) points the gun towards the hero, who throws the knife, carving it from, well, 100feet right in the villain #2 forehead (apply directly to the forehead! apply directly to the forehead! Now I know what it means).

The villain #1 arrives, shoots the hero and goes away. Yes, he wanted the guy pretty dead, but could not point the gun to the hot bad-ass babe pilot and waste her, too. Also he never wondered about... flak vests. Neither did she, because the hot bad-ass babe pilot forgot about the guy who killed her brother, and started to sob and cry and yell "don't die please don't die I need you you can't be dead don't die!" The villain #1 flees, and think as a real mastermind: "the area is surrounded by US Army choppers, I'm in a forest, that I know like the back of my hand. Should I simply use one of my 332 safehouses and wait things cool down or should I jump into my tiny little cheap chopper bought on an Airwolf surplus sale" Meanwhile...

A big Apache chopper lands, near the hero and the babe pilot. The Apache pilot does what every single pilot loves to do: Handles his 40 gazillion dollars chopper to the couple.

I don't need to mention that the villain #1 is also a bad-ass pilot.

And the little thing makes turns around the Apache.

They only manage to kill the guy when they decide to use ANOTHER useful resource: The Angry Rant While Firing.

The hero says "that's for killing my brother Sam!!" and fires the canon The babe says "that's for killing MY brother Jim!" and press the trigger, showing another Apache firing the rockets, a kind of gun with 0% of chance of downing another helicopter unless it's parked and marked with a big "aim here to blow this thing".

The best part is when they arrive at the base. The extras surround them, and start a chant "USA! USA!". It's not only cheesy, it's hilarious.

I'm not American (d'oh!) but I don't mind American patriotism when it's part of the plot. I've got goosebumps from the President's speech in Independence Day (go ahead, sue me) but hey, COME ON. Even Rambo never chanted "USA! USA!". Not even Chuck Norris. (But he could, of course) Oh, the couple of heroes start to french-kiss and talk about their honeymoon, while the extras chant their patriotic mantra.

The film is so wrong, is so bad, I only recommend it if you're really into trash movies. Otherwise stay away. Really. As a friend, I beg you.

A team of Rangers and a helicopter squad are in the country of Petrovia (near to Ruritania) in an advisory capacity to the government though their 'advice' consists of fierce military operations against a narcoterrorist called Ivan who is assisted by a henchman called Chicago. (!) The story is well worn and the dialogue is particularly painful. No one stands out in the cast and the movie got sillier as it went along, like Rambo but without the excitement or the thrilling Jerry Goldsmith music score. There are a plethora of colourful explosions to be sure but the combat scenes are terrible with no one with a gun of any kind being able to shoot straight. The romantic sub-plot is most unconvincing. Filmed in Bulgaria.

The second-best of the "American Heroes" series (the best being Special Forces), Air Strike is a cliché-ridden mess, but it's not boring. At least not most of the time.

When evil drug lord Ivan Stefanovich (Geraskov) and his nefarious army, the Tiger Guard, start causing trouble in the Eastern European country of Petrovia, the American helicopter pilots are called in to start shooting and missile-ing everything in sight. Ben Garret (Rusler) is called out of retirement to handle the situation because apparently his brother Jack was a legendary soldier. When Charlie (Gareis) (who turns out to be a...woman *gasp!*) joins the squadron, Top Gun-style sparks fly. Just because she is General Cornelius Jones' daughter, she doesn't want any special treatment. Garret is eventually captured and tortured by the baddies, but then he rejoins his team to exact an explosive revenge.

Now, I'm all for patriotism. I probably love America more than anyone you'll ever meet, but this is just ridiculous. It's like director David Worth was given the mandate "make it patriotic", and he went so far over the top it almost seems snide. It's as if he saying "Oh, they want patriotism, I'll give 'em patriotism..." There's an American flag in almost every scene in the movie, and the characters chant "U-S-A! U-S-A!" so much it's actually embarrassing. Interestingly, if you look at the end credits, the films in the American Heroes series are not made by Americans so I wonder what they thought about all this. But then again, I suppose no one's stopping them from making their own movie about Bulgarian pride.

It's hard to tell what's worse: the CGI missiles and helicopters, or the fact that they were mixed with actual explosions and stunts in an attempt to fool the audience into thinking it's all seamless. And while the character of Walker (Burdick) is constantly reading Lord of the Rings, and the character of Perez (Ivo Tonchev) is simply cliché-fodder, our hats should go off to Robert Rusler as Garret. We all know (or should know) Rusler from 80's classics like personal favorite Thrashin. Even though the one-liners he says to himself are not clever in any way, shape or form, his charm and charisma almost saves Air Strike. That's paying the man a great compliment. He all but triumphs over impossible odds. He deserves a lot of credit for making the film less of a slog of CGI doom. But saying any one actor or performance could transcend, and make Air Strike a good movie is like asking someone to go up Niagara Falls in a barrel. But kudos for Rusler for almost pulling it off.

Other things worth noting are the funny, overly deep and gravelly overdubbed "bad guy voice" Ivan Stefanovich has, the TV monitor that the military brass are constantly watching that says in giant letters taped to the screen "DRONE SCREEN" (maybe the film of Air Strike was playing on it...ha!), and the fact that Garret's team in the film is called "Blue Thunder". Why would they make the audience recall in their minds a good helicopter movie, thus making the one they are currently watching seem even worse by comparison? But the bottom line is that Air Strike has every cliché in the book and a lot of flaws, but Robert Rusler does his best.

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Recap: A small US force of some rangers and attack helicopters (apaches) is sent to the east European country of Petrovia (? -if I remember correctly) to aid the government in their battle against drug-lord/terrorist Ivan and his militia. A first strike against a drug convoy results in two apaches hit and three pilots dead. To replace them a retired ace is brought in, and a daughter of a general turns up. But before the unit can plan next strike, Ivan takes revenge, striking against a bank and the American mess hall. Now, it is personal...

Comments: I think that somewhere before they started to make this movie someone thought: "Hm, I sure do got a lot of fireworks, what to do? I know, lets make a movie! And hey, aren't those American helicopters cool?" Anyway, that it is how it seems. The one thing that is of good quality and done well are the explosions. No money spared there, and hence everything in sight blows up, for one reason or another, and blows up big. There are lot of huge fireballs. The apaches seem to have been a little harder to come by. So a lot of sequences of the helicopters are animated (poorly), and others seem to be to taken from some kind of commercial or technical video. The few scenes of real apaches I'm pretty sure are taken from the American mid west, although the movie is set in Europe.

The plot and story is bad, cheesy and predictable. Our helicopter hero is worse than Rambo, even when fighting on the ground. His magazines are unlimited and he is impossible to hit (which is in fact stated in the movie, he is simply charmed). On the other hand, the evil and supposedly well-trained militia acts and fights worse than kindergarten kids with water-rifles. I don't know what to think of the acting. To be fair they do not have much material to work with. But the acting do not elevate the average at all, so it is rather poor too.

Still, much of the impression a movie makes is about expectations. And this movie delivers about what I expected. I expected a simple movie with little story and much action. I got most of it. But they could have put a little more effort in it, and it would have been so much better.

3/10