Danger Zone
‘Born to Fly’ stays way too low to the ground for an air force movie and winds up more ‘iron eagle’ than ‘top gun’.
Born to Fly
Director: Liu Xiaoshi • Writers: Gui Guan, Liu Xiaoshi
Starring: Wang Yibo, Yu Shi, Hu Jun, Zhou Dongyu, Bu Yu, Zhai Yujia, Wang Zichen, Lu Xin, Tian Zhuangzhuang
China • 2hrs 8mins
Opens Hong Kong May 4 • IIA
Grade: C+
We’ve all heard the rumours about this one, yeah? Originally set for release in 2022, the now famous Born to Fly | 長空之王 was allegedly grounded by whoever makes these decisions after even more important people who make these decisions saw a cut last year and balked at putting the soft power aviation history epic in theatres so soon after Tom Cruise saved the movies with Top Gun: Maverick. More reliant on CGI than Cruise’s masterstroke, a near carbon copy of the first Top Gun as far as narrative beats go, lacking in an engaging story and, most unforgivably, thin on dog fights, Born to Fly is less a failure of policy ambitions than it is simply mediocre filmmaking.
Director Liu Xiaoshi’s debut tracks China’s development of its own stealth bomber technology after being abandoned by “foreign countries” who took their “experts” home and left it to flail against unidentified enemies by itself, and he lays on the woe-is-us determination thick. Given that the story is rooted in reality you’d expect the drama to be, well, more dramatic and pack a bigger emotional punch, but it never manages to raise any of its players beyond archetype level. And there’s not nearly enough aerial thrills, CGI or otherwise.
No volleyball, push-ups
As the story begins, talented, undisciplined young test pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell Lei Yu (Wang Yibo, Hidden Blade and still dead-eyed) gets recruited into a test pilot programme following a run-in with “enemy” fighters who after being told they’re in Chinese airspace declare “We’ll go wherever we want!” His stern but fatherly commander, Mike "Viper" Metcalf Zhang Ting (Hu Ju, Lan Yu) does the whole tough love thing and somehow encourages Lei to tap his inner engineer etcetera and so on. Of course Lei clashes with Iceman Deng Fang (Yu Shi) about who the swinging dick is, but eventually they become friends. There are many sacrifices on the way to a working stealth jet, so cue hangar classroom theory and training sequences, golden hour take-off and landings, locker room tension and manly physical competition. And ejections. So many ejections. Even though Liu had, arguably, better material to start with – the film pivots on pilots that worked these planes before military pilots flew them on missions – Liu opts for glorious heroics instead. Duh.
Born to Fly crashes where Wu Jing’s Wolf Warrior and Frant Gwo’s The Wandering Earth soared. The latter films could be as propagandistic as they liked – and boy, were they – but they also had some combination of great action, outlandish stories, white-knuckle tension, stellar visuals and central characters you could get behind when you looked past the messaging. Born to Fly isn’t bad, though the CGI aerial sequences aren’t as viscerally exciting as Cruise & Co’s practical stunt work, but it is cold. Lei never becomes a fully rounded person and his rivalry with Deng has the spark of a wet match. The less said about his anaemic romance with Zhou Dongyu’s doctor the better. These are the same working parts that made the Top Guns a thing, and if you’re going to rip off Top Gun, might as well do it right and go all in. But Liu’s ripping only scratches the surface of what made Tony Scott and Joseph Kosinski’s films such adrenalised classics. If only he’d snuck in more beach-based sport… — DEK