As one of the many Top Gun (1986) imitators to come out of Hollywood in the late eighties and early nineties Fire Birds (1990) doesn’t rate so badly. Compared to another Top Gun imitator, John Milius’ ill-fated Flight Of The Intruder (1991), the aerial photography and special effects in Fire Birds look state of the art. But what Fire Birds really gets by on is the performance of Tommy Lee Jones who brings depth and charisma to the well-worn and predictable role of Brad Little, training instructor. Nicolas Cage and Sean Young aren’t bad in the film, they simply have to navigate the limitations of the script and the constraints of the production.
From a contemporary vantage point Fire Birds holds the most interest as a document of a specific moment in time. Unlike many Top Gun inspired movies Fire Birds is explicitly political, designed primarily as a piece of propaganda for President George Bush Sr.’s “war on drugs”. Other blockbusters have addressed this rather shady political maneuver though with a much more critical eye towards the United States’ involvement in South and Central America. The Harrison Ford blockbuster Clear and Present Danger (1994), the best of the Jack Ryan movie franchise, frames President Bush’s “war on drugs” as an act of imperialism, as a second Vietnam War.
Fire Birds, however, is content to tow the Republican party line (circa 1989) and espouse on the nobility and virtues of President Bush’s crusade. The Tommy Lee Jones character, in a hurricane of patriotic gibberish, labels the cartels as “bloodthirsty” and the Nicolas Cage and Sean Young characters as “American heroes” with the bravado of his Two-Face in Batman Forever (1995). All of Jones’ cliches are juxtaposed with Cage’s choice to portray the central hero as a sleazy nerd and goofball. In this way Fire Birds feels almost like a testing ground for the far more popular film The Rock (1996).
When I first saw Fire Birds back in 2004 it was on a VHS that I rented from the video store that I worked at. There were a number of startling parallels between the rhetoric of Fire Birds and that of our President at the time who was so occupied with Iraq and his own crusade, the “war on terror”. Today this continuity between the two Bush presidencies as exemplified by Fire Birds is as disturbing as it is darkly humorous.
