Flight of Fury (2007)

Flight of Fury (2007)
Aka: Black Thunder; Enemy of the Unseen

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Mark Bazely, Steven Toussaint, Ciera Payton, Angus MacInnes, Alki David, Tim Woodward, Katie Jones, Cristina Teodorescu
Director: Michael Keusch
Action Director: Tom Delmar, Gabi Burlacu

 

Steven Seagal's follow-up to the inept Attack Force is a remake of American Ninja Michael Dudikoff's Black Thunder. Although William C. Martell wrote the latter, Seagal and writer/producer Joe Halpin are given full writing credits here, with Martell only getting a "Special Thanks" at the end. The similarities are so obvious that Seagal and Halpin did not even bother to change a lot of the characters’ names.

Seagal plays an ex-CIA operative/military Renaissance man who bails out of prison before the CIA can wipe his memory clean for knowing too many government secrets. The movie does not explain his background very well. To the military, he was the best stealth bomber pilot they had ever had. On the other hand, the CIA thought he knew too much, which would assume he was working knee-deep in some really secretive stuff. Can a man be both of those? Make up your mind, people!

He is picked up by the police in Southern California after foiling a robbery with his awesome aikido skills and is handed over to the military, who have a job for him: go into Afghanistan and retrieve a stolen experimental stealth bomber before terrorists use it to spread a deadly plague. The pilot who stole the aircraft is a former student of Seagal’s—another overused troupe in these movies. His contact in Afghanistan is a former lover (played by 18-year-old Ciera Payton).

Apparently, Seagal lost some weight for the role, and the film has a fair amount of action. I think it is Seagal doing most of the fighting, or at least they made more of an attempt to hide it better. Early on there’s a scene where Seagal foils a convenience store robbery, which feels ripped off from his earlier Hard to Kill. There are a lot of knife stabbings and a semi-long (by Seagal's standards) pole fight against a terrorist at the end. It is no Gordon Liu vs. Philip Ko Fei from Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, or Jet Li vs. Donnie Yen from Once Upon a Time in China II.  It’s mainly attack, block, attack, block, Seagal hits the guy in face, rinse and repeat. Nonetheless, with these late period Seagal films, we take what we can get. Disappointingly, the movie ends with an unexciting dog fight between an F-16 and a stealth bomber.

On the salacious side of things, the movie had some @MeToo goings-on with the lead actress. According to the Internet Movie Database, Miss Payton signed on to the film with only having had half the script sent to her. It was only when she was en route to Romania that she discovered that there would be a nude scene leading into a lesbian sex scene. When she brought her concerns to Seagal, his response was (apparently), "So you don't want to show off your tits?" Bear in mind that the woman had recently graduated into adulthood. She did end up clothed for the sequence in question, however. Nonetheless, Ciera Payton has gone on to say that she felt like a sex object during that particular experience.