Firefox (1982): C-

Firefox may feature, as critic Dave Kehr has written, the most isolated protagonist ever embodied by star/director Clint Eastwood. But any subtexts about memory and identity – the former being a paralyzing influence on Eastwood’s ace fighter pilot Mitchell Gant (who’s wracked by images of a Vietnamese girl being napalmed), the latter being something Gant must ultimately obliterate in order to fulfill his covert mission – are made largely irrelevant by the tedium of this clunky thriller. Firefox’s Bressonian first half trades in austere Cold War espionage, as the near-silent Gant – assigned to infiltrate the USSR and steal a thought-controlled plane called Firefox – assumes a series of disguises to complete his quest. The polar opposite second half, on the other hand, is merely a lame Star Wars rip-off in which Gant commandeers the telepathy-powered jet and is forced into an aerial dogfight (characterized by now-dated special effects) with another, identical plane. That there’s weighty stuff going on underneath the film’s genre exterior is debatable. Yet as a spy adventure, the movie is close to abysmal, a tedious slog in which pointless exposition pours forth from uninteresting peripheral characters while the star barely utters a word or changes his squinty facial expression for two interminably long hours.