Capt. Cummings has bad news: They’re being joined by a “fourth wingman.” This is a UCAV (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle) controlled by a computer. The pilots are unhappy, but not so unhappy that Gannon and Wade do not feel a powerful sexual attraction, although pilots are not supposed to fraternize. At one point Gannon visits Wade’s cabin, where she has laundry hanging on the line, and is nearly struck by a wet brassiere. “Pardon my C-cup,” she says, a line I doubt any human female would use in such a situation.
Suddenly the pilots have to scramble for an emergency: “Three terrorist cells are about to meet in twenty-four minutes in Rangoon,” Capt. George tells them. Remarkable, that this information is so precise and yet so tardy. The pilots find they not only have time to take off from the aircraft carrier and fly to Burma, but to discuss their strategy via radio once they get there. The meeting is in a building that is still under construction. Computer simulations show that if it falls over, it will kill a lot of people on the ground. Amazing what computers can do these days. However, if the building is struck from directly above, it may fall down in its own footprint.
Alas, the rocket bombs carried by the planes do not achieve the necessary penetration velocity. Lt. Gannon decides that if he goes into a vertical dive, he can increase the velocity. The bomb is released, he pulls out of the dive low enough for everyone in Rangoon to get a good look at his plane, and the building collapses. It looks so much like the falling towers of the World Trade Center that I felt violated by the image.
Whoops! Another emergency. Lightning strikes the UCAV, which goes nuts and starts to download songs from the Internet. “How many? All of them.” The computer also starts to think for itself and to make decisions that contradict orders. Meanwhile, the three human pilots, having participated in a mission that destroyed a skyscraper in Burma, may be on a worldwide most-wanted list, but they’re immediately sent to Thailand for R&R. This gives Gannon a chance to photograph Wade in a bikini under a waterfall, while Purcell picks up a beautiful Thai girl. Soon all four of them are having lunch, and the three pilots are discussing military secrets in front of the Thai girl, who “doesn’t speak English.” Beautiful Thai girls who allow themselves to be picked up by U.S. pilots almost always speak English, but never mind. It’s not that Purcell is too stupid to know that trusting her is dangerous; it’s that the movie is too stupid.
How stupid? Nothing happens. The girl can’t speak English.
Next mission: A nuclear crisis in Tajikistan! A warlord has nuclear bombs. The team flies off to the “former Soviet republic,” where a nuclear cloud threatens five hundred thousand people, and Lt. Wade helpfully radios that they’re going to need medical attention.
Various unexpected developments lead to a situation in which Lt. Wade’s plane crashes in North Korea while Lt. Gannon is diverted to Alaska (they get such great fuel mileage on these babies, they must be hybrid vehicles). Then Gannon and the UCAV fly an unauthorized mission to rescue Wade, a mission that will succeed if the North Koreans have neglected to plant land mines in the part of the DMZ that Wade must cross.
Now about Newton’s laws of motion. Let me try this out on you. A plane is about to explode. The pilot ejects. The plane explodes, and flaming debris falls out of the sky and threatens to hit the pilot and the parachute. If the plane is going at Mach One, Two, or Three, wouldn’t the debris be falling miles away from the descent path of the pilot? I’m glad you asked. The parachute sucks up that flaming debris like a quantum sponge.
The Sweetest Thing
(DIRECTED BY ROGER KUMBLE; STARRING CAMERON DIAZ, CHRISTINA APPLEGATE; 2002)
I like Cameron Diaz. I just plain like her. She’s able to convey bubble-brained zaniness about as well as anyone in the movies right now, and then she can switch gears and give you a scary dramatic performance in something like Vanilla Sky. She’s a beauty, but apparently without vanity; how else to account for her appearance in Being John Malkovich, or her adventures in There’s Something About Mary? I don’t think she gets halfway enough praise for her talent.
Consider her in The Sweetest Thing. This is not a good movie. It’s deep-sixed by a compulsion to catalogue every bodily fluids gag in There’s Something About Mary and devise a parallel clone-gag. It knows the words but not the music; while the Farrelly brothers got away with murder, The Sweetest Thing commits suicide.
And yet there were whole long stretches of it when I didn’t much care how bad it was—at least, I wasn’t brooding in anger about the film—because Cameron Diaz and her costars had thrown themselves into it with such heedless abandon. They don’t walk the plank, they tap-dance.
The movie is about three girls who just wanna have fun. They hang out in clubs, they troll for cute guys, they dress like Maxim cover girls, they study paperback best-sellers on the rules of relationships, and frequently (this comes as no surprise), they end up weeping in each other’s arms. Diaz’s running mates, played by Christina Applegate and Selma Blair, are pals and confidantes, and a crisis for one is a crisis for all.
The movie’s romance involves Diaz meeting Thomas Jane in a dance club; the chemistry is right but he doesn’t quite accurately convey that the wedding he is attending on the weekend is his own. This leads to Diaz’s ill-fated expedition into the wedding chapel, many misunderstandings, and the kind of Idiot Plot dialogue in which all problems could be instantly solved if the characters were not studiously avoiding stating the obvious.
The plot is merely the excuse, however, for an astonishing array of sex and body plumbing jokes, nearly all of which dream of hitting a home run like There’s Something About Mary, but do not. Consider Mary’s scene where Diaz has what she thinks is gel in her hair. Funny—because she doesn’t know what it really is, and we do. Now consider the scene in this movie where the girls go into a men’s room and do not understand that in a men’s room a hole in the wall is almost never merely an architectural detail. The payoff is sad, sticky, and depressing.
Or consider a scene where one of the roommates gets “stuck” while performing oral sex. This is intended as a rip-off of the “franks and beans” scene in Mary, but gets it all wrong. You simply cannot (I am pretty sure about this) get stuck in the way the movie suggests—no, not even if you’ve got piercings. More to the point, in Mary the victim is unseen, and we picture his dilemma. In Sweetest Thing, the victim is seen, sort of (careful framing preserves the R rating), and the image isn’t funny. Then we get several dozen neighbors, all singing to inspire the girl to extricate herself; this might have looked good on the page, but it just plain doesn’t work, especially not when embellished with the sobbing cop on the doorstep, the gay cop, and other flat notes.
More details. Sometimes it is funny when people do not know they may be consuming semen (as in American Pie) and sometimes it is not, as in the scene at the dry cleaners in this movie. How can you laugh when what you really want to do is hurl? And what about the scene in the ladies’ room, where the other girls are curious about Applegate’s boobs and she tells them she paid for them and invites them to have a feel, and they do, like shoppers at Kmart? Again, a funny concept. Again, destroyed by bad timing, bad framing, and overkill. Because the director, Roger Kumble, doesn’t know how to set it up and pay it off with surgical precision, he simply has women pawing Applegate while the scene dies. An unfunny scene only grows worse by pounding in the concept as if we didn’t get it.