One of those movies that makes you embarrassed to be an American (but glad, at the same time, no longer to be a teenager). An Air Force fighter pilot, on routine maneuvers, is forced down by an unnamed Arab nation and sentenced to hang. Surely the President will do something this time. "Why you think they call him Ronnie Rea-GUN?" offers the pal of the pilot's seventeen-year-old son, who wants to follow in his father's vapor trail, and has become a sort of pinball wizard on the F-16 Simulator at the Air Force base (helped by a rock-and-roll cassette strapped to his thigh to give him his "rhythm"). But the President, as before, does nothing. "They don't have the balls to stand up to those bastards!" fumes the teenaged patriot, who then, with a little help from his friends and from a sort of shanghaied scoutmaster, commandeers a couple of real F-16s and takes matters into his own hands. Imagine the condemned man's surprise and delight when his own son single-handedly plucks him from his captors' grasp, blows up their base of operations, shoots down and/or eludes a whole hornet's cloud of Russian MIGs: "Way to fly, Doug!" It's enough to make Red Dawn seem a movie of unsparing honesty and profound tragedy by comparison. Jason Gedrick, Louis Gossett, Jr., and Tim Thomerson; directed by Sidney J. Furie. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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