1990's Firebirds is Nicolas Cage's Top Gun, Only Somehow Even Worse
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
Nicolas Cage is truly a man of mystery. How did the Academy Award winner end up shitting out literally dozens upon dozens of forgettable, largely interchangeable direct-to-video action movies after spending the first decade of his career leaping from high to high, collaborating with heavyweight filmmakers like his uncle Francis Ford Coppola (The Cotton Club, Rumble Fish, Peggy Sue Got Married), Norman Jewison (Moonstruck) Alan Parker (Birdy), the Coen Brothers (Raising Arizona) and David Lynch (Wild at Heart) and making stone-cold cult classics like Valley Girl and Vampire’s Kiss?
If you had not paid attention to Cage’s career up until that point casting him as the Tom Cruise knockoff in a hilariously derivative Top Gun wannabe like 1990’s Firebirds makes perfect sense. After all, Cage certainly has the charisma to play the Tom Cruise character. He has the swagger. He has the movie star magnetism. He has the talent. In his radiant youth, Cage’s delicate beauty matched Cruise’s.
If you had been paying attention to Cage’s career, however, making an 87 minute long advertisement for the military-industrial complex for a division of Disney feels like a betrayal of everything Cage had done up to that point as an actor, ARTIST, icon and man.
In the stretch of just a few years Cage made Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, Vampire’s Kiss, Wild at Heart, and somehow also Firebirds, a movie that begins by reverently quoting the tough talking words of a true American badass who taunted, “Our message to the drug cartels is this: the rules have changed. We will help any government that wants our help. When requested, we will for the first time make available the appropriate resources of America’s Armed Forces.”
Firebirds starts off by lovingly licking the boot of President and preeminent Drug Warrior George H.W Bush, who didn’t care whether it was prudent or not to send our nation’s great planes and helicopters to go hunt down the bad guys: he did it anyway and Firebirds is of the mindset that everything the United States military does is awesome, and invariably in the service of right.
Firebirds is a movie that silently but very loudly cries out with every frame, USA! USA! USA! Then again, it’s perhaps excessively generous to call Firebirds a motion picture instead of propaganda.
In Firebirds, Nicolas Cage plays LT Pete "Maverick" Mitchel, the hotshot pilot Tom Cruise played in Top Gun. Oh sure, he’s got a different name, (Jake Preston), and Cage flies a helicopter instead of a fighter jet but other than that they pretty much are the exact same character.
Weirdly enough, this is not the first time Nicolas Cage has made a shitty Tom Cruise movie. In 1986 Cage did his version of a Tom Cruise sports movie in The Boy in Blue, which cast him in the Tom Cruise role of a good-looking young upstart who knows he’s the best of the best and has the attitude and the swagger to go with it.
In Firebirds, as in the archetypal Tom Cruise movie, the brash young man must overcome past trauma and self-doubt to prove himself personally and professionally with the help of a tough but supportive mentor who sees greatness and more than a little of himself in him, and a beautiful love interest who challenges him to be his very best.
I don’t remember what this is but it looks weird.
Tommy Lee Jones is a lot of fun as the gruff but supportive mentor, Brad Little. Jones wasn’t an Academy Award winner famous for his grim, joyless outlook on life and dour personality when he made Firebirds. In an uncharacteristic move, Jones not only sanctions Firebirds’ buffoonery, he enthusiastically cosigns it, really throwing himself into the movie’s little boy conception of adult heroism.
Jones’ twinkly-eyed, energetic turn marks perhaps the only way Firebirds improves on Top Gun. Like the hotshots they play here, Cage and Jones are true naturals, geniuses only a few years away from winning Academy Awards.
The same cannot be said, alas, of Sean Young, who truly delivers a Golden Raspberries-worthy turn here as Billie Lee Guthrie, a hotshot girl helicopter pilot with a long, unfortunate romantic history with our hero.
He came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. Thankfully, he still has a fair amount of bubblegum left.
The three cornerstones of Jake’s treatment of Young’s painfully arbitrary love interest are sexism, sexual harassment and condescension.
In what sadly passes for the film’s idea of sexy, when Jake’s helicopter is flying above Billie Lee’s he decides to engage in a little high-altitude sexual harassment and favors his ex and future lover with an endless series of crude double entendres.
“I’ve got a display on your tail that is just mind-boggling!” Jake leers when Billie Lee tries to give him essential information about their helicopters. When Billie Lee makes the mistake of telling a dude who is only thinking about how bad he wants to fuck her, “You will need reconnaissance going into battle, Jake. For example, with our laser designator, we can paint your target while you’re hidden in some canyon so you can nail it from cover without ever being seen” Jake responds boorishly, “I’d love to nail it!”
The chemistry just EXPLODES off the screen!
When Billie Lee asks where Jake’s helicopter is, he sleazes back, “I remember you like me on top”, which I believe is a reference to how he liked to have sex with her with his penis back when they were lovers, as evidenced by the kissy-face that accompanies his sordid innuendo. .
Billie Lee sasses him back, “Jake you still got your brains in your cockpit”, another reference to his penis, and how he would like to put it inside her, which they obviously can’t do at the moment, since they’re both flying helicopters.
In movies like Firebirds, as long as the “hero” is doing it, sexual harassment is like having women drink malt liquor in Billy Dee Williams Colt 45. commercials: women love it, whether they know it or not, and it works every time.
Now I’m imagining a movie where Jake and Billie Lee do somehow manage to have sex while each is flying an attack helicopter. That movie is instantly ten times better than the patriotic turkey we got, which has dialogue like, “Listen up, gun bunnies, straight from the Buzz Man. Just like the Indian scouts in the old days, we’re the modern equivalent! You’re our eyes and ears, the folks who stick their necks out to see what’s out there so you can shoot it down and be heroes!”
Cage makes history here as the first helicopter pilot to wear a monocle in battle
It isn’t long until Jake’s campaign of sexual harassment pays off and these two helicopter hot shots are making the beast with two backs. Ah, but Young’s dead-eyed mouth breather is here to do more than be charmed by Jake’s crude double entendres. In the climactic battle she literally utters the line, “Come on, Jake, save my ass!” before he does just that, being a man and all.
If Cage, who is gung-ho and over-the-top to the point of being a gonzo parody of the Tom Cruise “winner” archetype, and Young, who delivers all of her lines in a halting, robotic monotone that feels like she’s unhappily encountering these words for the first time, have powerful anti-chemistry, Cage’s sexual chemistry with the helicopters he has the honor of flying and killing people with is explosive.
Firebirds works best as delirious, unintentional self-parody, a straight-faced, "dramatic” version of Team America: World Police or MacGruber. It helps that it’s about 85 minutes long and moves like a freight train of pure macho idiocy.
Firebirds is nothing short of pornographic in its lust for the killing machines of the American military. A XXX parody version wouldn’t need any additional sex scenes between actors, just a very intense, passionate half hour sequence of Jake satiating his incredible sexual hunger for the sweet, sweet Apache airship of his dreams by thrusting his penis into its tail pipe over and over again, David Cronenberg’s Crash-style, until he achieves orgasm.
The first time Jake rides in an Apache he gushes to Brad, “Sir, that was totally cool! I’d marry that thing!” but it’s clear he just wants to fuck this powerful instrument of death, and every sexy, sexy Apache helicopter just like it.
If Firebirds had any goddamn integrity or honesty at all it would be called Helicopter Fuckers but instead it had to settle for naming itself after the only venereal disease you get from fucking an aircraft.
Speaking of sex, and helicopters, Billie Lee tries to make Jake feel better about freaking out during his first time fighting in the Apache by telling him, “It’s like sex! Hardly anybody gets it perfect the first time.”
Firebirds was, astonishingly, Cage’s very first time headlining a forgettable, ragingly unambitious action movie solely for the sake of a big payday. When he made the movie it was a crazy anomaly in his career: a hilariously jingoistic deification of military force from the folks at Walt Disney from a hardcore method actor whose peculiar gifts had recently been exploited by the likes of Norman Jewison, the Coen Brothers and David Lynch
In the decades ahead, starring roles in mediocre action movies would be the rule rather than the exception for Cage, which gives Firebirds a weird, naive charm. You never forget the first time, after all, even when it’s as staggeringly, even impressively unmemorable as this.
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