Fire Birds - Three-peckered goats and eye dominance issues.

As much as our own personal politics may want us to deny it, the following three things are very, very cool:

1) Movies featuring the American Armed Forces.

2) This thing:

3) This guy:

Awesomely, Nicolas Cage's 1990 venture into the military movie genre (no, I'm not counting Birdy as a war movie) Fire Birds is or contains all three of these.

In one shot, no less!

The writing is cheesy, Hollywood-patriot blather at times, and military technobabble at others (yes, I am counting Jones's "You'll be busier than a three-peckered goat" as military technobabble here), but overall quite passable.

Cage plays hotshot helicopter pilot (is there any other kind?) Jake Preston, who is just beginning flight combat training in the Apache helicopter, a training led by Brad Little (Jones), an aging hotshot helicopter pilot (see?) in preparation to take on a malevolent international mercenary hotshot helicopter pilot named Eric Stoller, who has been enlisted by an unnamed drug cartel in a relentlessly unnamed South American county.

Seriously, the number of times that the completely, uselessly nebulous geographical designation "South America" is tossed around in this movie during precise mission orders dialogue is insane.

Near as I can tell, there is no Catamarca Desert (although there is a desert in the Argentinian province of Catamarca, but I guess they relied on the absence of Google to preserve the anonymous nature of the cartel-ridden country in question in the film...)

As is the way with such things, there's a girl involved, who is vaguely established to be a former love interest of Cage, and whose path has brought her back into his life, and there's a personal challenge that helps to bring hotshot pilot A back into the realm of "I'm almost ready to admit that I'm a fallible human being."

The nature of this reality check is interesting - it's basically a problem for Preston that he is left-eye dominant, and the Apache's targeting system (or something) used an eye piece over the pilot's right eye. This causes problems.

I don't know nearly enough about the state of the early '90s American Army vis-a-vis eye dominance to know whether the fact that this problem comes as a complete mystery to Preston, and something that Little doesn't even come up with as a cause for the otherwise nearly flawless pilot's performance (despite having apparently suffered the same thing himself early in his own career) is representative or just a plot device. I sort of hope it's the latter.

Here's how they fix Preston's eye-dominance difficulties:

They wrap women's underwear around his head and give him a rudimentary periscope, and then they have him speed through a busy Army base in a jeep while wearing the get-up. They also (for some reason) spraypaint the windshield of the jeep black, just in case the underpants don't do enough to obscure his vision.

I'd recommend this one for, say, a Sunday afternoon that seems fit for lounging. Like today, for instance. It's an easy movie, the writing flubs and plot holes are pretty easy to overlook as long as you don't take yourself too seriously, and (because I don't believe spoilers are a thing for movies that are 23 years old) the bad guy gets both shot to pieces and blown up in the end, so that's also pretty badass.