‘Rocketeer’ Doggedly Plays It Straight

Like its intrepid hero, fearless flyboy Cliff Secord, “The Rocketeer” simply wears you down. This film is so dogged, so insistent, so relentlessly earnest in its one-dimensionality that no option but partial surrender to such charms as it has seems possible.

Set in 1938 Los Angeles, this tale of how a youth with a dream turns himself into a man who can fly and fight evil at the same time bears a far from coincidental resemblance to other updated cliffhangers like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Star Wars.”

But this is the ‘90s, the decade of diminished expectations, and while those films wanted to simultaneously kid the genre and serve up the action, “The Rocketeer” plays things, if not totally straight, more so than one would have thought possible, much less desirable.

This is not an updated anything. This is a thrill twice removed, one of the most faithful re-creations imaginable of a Saturday matinee presentation. It’s twice removed because the original “Rocketeer” was not a vintage serial but a nostalgic graphic novel created by comic artist Dave Stevens in 1981.

It became an almost instantaneous cult hit, at least partly because Stevens gave his straight-arrow hero a girlfriend inspired by a most unusual source: Betty Page, the real-life postwar pinup queen whose provocatively pouty poses quickly became a cottage industry.

While Page is nowhere to be found (thanks, Uncle Walt), screenwriters Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo have otherwise stuck reasonably closely to Stevens’ original story. “The Rocketeer” (citywide) opens with handsome young pilot Secord (Bill Campbell) about to take to the skies in the Gee Bee, a snub-nosed plane that is the pride and joy of a Gyro Gearloose-type mechanic named Peevy (a surprisingly blond Alan Arkin).

While the aim of the flight is to prep the plane for “the nationals,” an event often referred to but never explained, fate has something else in store. The Gee Bee gets caught in a crippling exchange of gunfire between determined FBI agents and some bad guys fleeing with a mysterious package that looks suspiciously like Flash Gordon’s vacuum cleaner.

That package turns out to contain the Cirrus X-3, an experimental strap-on rocket pack that transforms the wearer into a flying machine. Naturally, the FBI wants to get its hands on it, as does the inventor and groups of miscreants too numerous to mention. But our Cliff, being the kind of can-do kid that he is, wants to try it out for himself, and hang the consequences.

In Bill Campbell, a young TV actor with no previous feature exposure, the filmmakers have gotten exactly the kind of prewar photogenic impetuosity they were after. And as his girlfriend Jenny, a young (and very virtuous) aspiring actress whose last role was standing behind Myrna Loy with a bowl of grapes, they cast the equally winsome Jennifer Connelly, who looks like she could have stepped right out of the junior prom into the grasp of Ming the Merciless.

It’s no accident that these two look so right, for it was apparently very important to director Joe Johnston, a former designer whose debut was “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” that this film have the correct vintage appearance. Not only planes, but automobiles, telephones, radios, buses, even packages of gum are all lovingly re-created, as is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown house in the Hollywood Hills and a bulldog-shaped eatery that once perched on West Washington Boulevard. Even the film’s dialogue, lines like “That flyboy lands one on my kisser and you let him walk,” is lifted wholesale from another era.

Admirable as all this verisimilitude may be, “The Rocketeer’s” PG-13 sense of being a perfectly preserved artifact best suited to the taste of 10-year-old boys only takes you so far before a sense of the bland leading the bland begins to creep in. Even the complicated special effects needed to make young Secord fly don’t ignite any real fires.

What the film needs is wit and that is what, and barely in time, Timothy Dalton supplies. As Neville Sinclair, America’s No. 3 box-office star and a swashbuckling dead-ringer for Errol Flynn down to the staircases he fights on, Dalton brings a critically needed sense of flair and energy to the film. Dalton is as vivid here as he’s ever been on screen (including his stint as James Bond) and the film comes to much-needed life when he is around. He makes the rest of “Rocketeer’s” perfect squareness palatable, and makes it possible for us to relate to its gee-whiz allure. Now if only someone had had the good sense to cast him as Robin Hood, this might have shaped up as a summer to remember.

‘The Rocketeer’

Bill Campbell: Cliff Secord

Jennifer Connelly: Jenny

Alan Arkin: Peevy

Timothy Dalton: Neville Sinclair

Paul Sorvino: Eddie Valentine

Terry O’Quinn: Howard Hughes

Tiny: Ron Lothar

A Gordon Company production in association with Silver Screen Partners IV, released by Walt Disney Pictures. Director Joe Johnston. Producers Lawrence Gordon, Charles Gordon, Lloyd Levin. Executive producer Larry Franco. Screenplay Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo. Cinematographer Hiro Narita. Editor Arthur Schmidt. Costumes Marilyn Vance-Straker. Music James Horner. Production design Jim Bissell. Art director Christopher Burian-Mohr. Set designers Carl J. Stensel, Paul Sonski, John Berger. Set decorator Linda DeScenna. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG.