My review was written in October 1986 after watching the film at a Times Square screening room.
"Sky Bandits" misfires on all cylinders. Meant as a rollicking World War I adventure, mishmash of a feature is missing a plotoline. Touted as the most expensive (production budget pegged at $18,000,000), indie British film ever, pic doesn't deliver the expected values on screen and has a no-name cast that won'[t help it attract attention domestically or overseas. Distrib Galaxy International has unwisely opted for a national saturation release.
Originally titled "Gunbus" (after the small fighter planes featured), Thom Keyes' unsatisfactory screenplay opens with a reel of two young heroes (Scott McGinnis and Jeff Osterhage) making like Butch Cassidy & Sundance (the early days, that is) in montages of bank robberies. Switch this pointless material headed nowhere the boys are suddenly sent to France to fight in the Great War against the dreaded hun.
Misadventures for the duo include a gam of one upmanship with haughty British flyers, a little sack time with two pretty mademoiselles (Valerie Steffen, Ingrid Held) and a mission to destroy a vast Graf Zeppelin the Germans are using for bombing runs. With dogfighter prowess picked up instantly (heroes decide to try piloting biplanes on a dare), they save the day and are subsequently back in the west blowing up banks quicker than you can say "Blue Max".
Film plods along episodically wit no forward momentum to the sotry: every once in a while there is a dissolve and a new scene has beguyn. Since Keyes' script lacks humor, the boring repartee between the two wooden heroes is downright deadly. What producer Richard Herland and director Zoran Perisic deliver is a succession of pretty but very fake-looking model plane shots or process shnots. The excitement of aerial dogfights, which have entertained audiences in hundreds of war films and served as the inspiration for "Star Wars" is missing.
Cast is tgruly awful, with the only familiar actor, Ronald Lacey, hamming it up and American leads McGinnis and Osterhage lacking the charisma this sort of yarn calls for. Production, including David Watkin's photography, is technically adequate but wholly lacking in verisimilitude. For all the money spent, it would have been more convincing to use stock footage left over from "Hell's Angels" The comic book approach doesn't work.
With Rank, ITC and Thorn EMI as recent examples, experienced British producers have learned how difficult it is to try and compete with the Americans via big-budget projects; modest efforts like "Gregory's Girl" and "My Beautiful Laundrette" have been more successful. "Sky Bandits" will undoubtedly reinforce this conventional wisdom.
