Blue Thunder Reviews

To be honest, I had no idea what to expect from this flick and the only reason I actually ended up watching the damned thing was because it was available on Netflix and because another listal member advised me to check it out. I wonder if this movie had been an inspiration for the TV-show 'Airwolf' which came out one year before this movie released. I do have to admit that I did watch 'Airwolf' when I was a kid but, while the concept was maybe fun when I was 12 years old, it just looks so lame now. Indeed, even though I have a weak spot for Roy Scheider, I really struggled to care about the damned thing. Of course, I do understand that the whole point was to have some cool action scenes with some fancy helicopter but, I'm sorry, the story was just so ludicrous and barely made sense. Seriously, there was not 1 but even 2 scenes of the pilots playing Peeping toms which displayed the level of this movie. I mean, to focus on a helicopter pilot working with the LAPD was not such a bad idea but how do you engage such a character in the action as this job was by nature rather passive? Well, in this case, they turned him into some kind of detective which was just ridiculous. Even more problematic was the fact that the 'evil' plan of the bad guys was never really clear to me. Apparently, there was some kind of conspiracy with some rather obscure political agenda but it was just so poorly developed. And, of course, you had Malcolm McDowell playing his usual bad guy (when the guy actually had an intense phobia of flying...) and it was so sad that, barely 10 years after 'A Clockwork Orange', his career was already going pretty much nowhere. Anyway, to conclude, even though this movie was apparently fairly successful when it was released, it was actually terribly lame and I don't think it is really worth a look.