Biggles (1988)

Did you people see the same film I saw?

Boring

Absolutely the worst movie.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

BIGGLES is one of the quintessentially British literary heroes; a decent chap whose adventures in book form stretched from the war over the Western Front to crime-solving capers in exotic locations. With tiresome inevitability, this Hollywood re-imagining mangled all that to give us the 'humorous' story of a 1980s American yuppie who gets dragged through time back to WWI, where he bumps into Biggles as the two try to stop a fantastical German secret weapon capable of winning the war. The electronic soundtrack is fine, if out of place, but there's precious little else that can be said for it. The concept is just so terrible that the film can't recover, not even with Peter Cushing doing what he can in his last performance.

BIGGLES could have been a great, authentic adaptation of the famous 'boy's own' adventure stories by Captain W. E. Johns, but some genius scriptwriter had the idea of updating the storyline to then modern day to draw in the American audience. Thus we get a slapdash sci-fi outing involving an annoying Yank who repeatedly time travels to WW1, where he gets involved with the antics of the eponymous hero.In essence, this is a film of two halves. The period-era stuff is fairly decent, featuring a workable performance from Neil Dickson as the hero. There are the requisite aerial dogfights and gun battles, all of it following a simplistic action-template formula, but it works well enough. The old ruined gasworks setting of Kubrik's FULL METAL JACKET is brought into play again and provides a fitting backdrop for the action.A shame, then, that the modern-day stuff is so off-putting, and no surprise that it has dated more than the WW1 story. Alex Hyde-White's American accent is way over the top, and the lame humour adds absolutely nothing to the story. The only good part is the presence of Peter Cushing in a large-ish supporting role; this was to be his final screen performance, and it's an acceptable denouement for the star, his character filled with the quiet dignity we've come to associate with the actor.

I like this movie, having just seen it for the first time, and I have never read the original Biggles books. But, it's clear even to me that the film hasn't attempted to stay true to the original stories.Nethertheless I found great entertainment value in this movie, which is simply to be enjoyed in a rather light hearted way it seems.No doubt this time-travel based production was slip-streaming behind the great success of Back to the Future, and it's a real roller-coaster ride and a fantastic culture clash between the 1980's and WWI eras. Any such movie released back in the mid-eighties should have done well at the box office, at least on paper.This film really is so eighties though, from the synthesiser-heavy intro music, down to the "punk scene", and the strikingly bleak grayish hotel lobby and eighties typefaces, that even people like myself who grew up in the eighties will probably feel more at home in what seems like the more "normal" WWI scenes.Was the eighties really that potently eighties? Obviously, it was, but it didn't seem like that at the time of course.So for me, this film has been a trip back in time to the eighties, and it fits in so well with a great sequence of other really enjoyable films I watched back then in my teenage years. I can't believe I somehow didn't see it at the time, but I'm really glad to have seen it at last in 2007.The aircraft scenes were highly enjoyable, and it's always good to see Peter Cushing too.7/10 from me.

Biggles was originally a WW1 pilot created by Captain W.E Johns in a series of dashing adventure novels. I'm not a purist and I don't mind new twists on old material, but this sci-fi/time-travel slant on the old stories strains the patience beyond belief. It's such a contrived, feeble concept - badly scripted, badly directed and badly acted - that only the most easily satisfied of viewers will enjoy it. You know you're in trouble from the moment the film's cheesy disco-style theme tune, "Do You Want To Be A Hero", kicks in during the opening credits. Young New Yorker James Ferguson (Alex Hyde-White) arrives home at his apartment only to be confronted by a mysterious old Englishman named Colonel Raymond (Peter Cushing). Moments later, there's a mysterious flash of lightning and Ferguson finds himself whisked back in time to a WW1 battlefield, just in time to save the life of ace pilot Biggles (Neil Dickson). It turns out that Ferguson and Biggles are "time twins" and that whenever one is in grave danger, the other will come zapping through time to the rescue. The wittiest moment in the film comes during the final credits, when a monicker comes up on screen reading: "Filmed on location in New York - London - and the Western Front 1917". Other than that, this is a witless affair indeed. It's quite sad to see the legendary Cushing slumming in such a weakly written cameo role. Some of the action sequences set during WW1 rise to the giddy heights of "mediocre", but the 1980s sequences are hopelessly tacky, and the twist ending in which our irritating hero is zapped back to a cave full of cannibal tribesmen is just plain awful. On the whole, Biggles is a monumental example of how low a point entertainment sank to during the era of cinematic junk that was the '80s.