Stealth

When I saw in the New Times that the double feature at the Sunset was what were, by all accounts, the two dumbest movies of the summer, and maybe of all time, I briefly considered going anyway. But then I remembered what my granddaddy used to say when some unpleasant course of action was suggested: “Let’s don’t and say we did.” He’s right. Some movies are so, so awful that you don’t even need to see all of the trailers to know they stink. So we didn’t go, but I’m going to say we did, and let some other critics speak for me, culled from Metacritic:

New York Post, Kyle Smith: “The scene where a pilot bails out in Stealth is so over-painted with CGI that it doesn’t look as real as the sequence starring Shepard that inspired it in The Right Stuff, a movie made with model airplanes.”

The Globe and Mail, Liam Lacey: “Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) is no stranger to cornball excess but Stealth is his chef-d’oeuvre, a movie so audaciously preposterous and jingoistic it plays like a parody of the genre.”

Miami Herald, Peter Debruge: “Stealth is basically the kind of movie a 13-year-old boy given an infinite budget and creative freedom might cook up between Xbox games.”

Village Voice, Ed Halter: “Its action sequences, more geeky than thrilling, fail to rescue the laughable plot.”

TV Guide, Maitland McDonagh: “Even by the degraded standards of dim-witted summer blockbusters, this is sorry stuff.”

Boston Globe, Ty Burr: “For a movie to pretend, in the face of the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children directly or indirectly caused by our presence there, that we can wage war without anyone really getting hurt isn’t naive, or wishful thinking, or a jim-dandy way to spend a Saturday night at the movies. It’s an obscenity.”

Washington Post, Stephen Hunter: “It’s not new. It’s not interesting. I wish it would go away.”