Not so very stealthy

If you’re going to steal, you might as well steal big. “Stealth” has pilfered from “Top Gun,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and a few other places to produce a slick piece of summer entertainment that is counting on elaborate special effects to make its derivative, convoluted story line all but irrelevant.

Though “Stealth” stars Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx as a charismatic trio of hotshot Navy fliers freshly minted for the new millennium, the filmmakers appear more interested in how their planes can be made to fly than who is flying them.

Much of the “Stealth” press material is given over to director Rob Cohen’s enthusiasm for a 100-ton gimbal specially made to re-create jet plane movements and his wonder at Tergen, a computerized system for matching those moves to actual terrain. Even Maverick and Ice Man would have been impressed.

Cohen, whose previous films include big earners like “The Fast and the Furious” and “XXX,” certainly knows how to keep things busy. In addition to all that flying, there are lots of blinking computer screens, an explosion so big it had to be registered with NASA, not to mention a year’s worth of whooshing noises on the soundtrack.

The trio of pilots, looking good in the requisite slow-motion flight-suited walk down an aircraft carrier deck, are prouder than punch to be flying top-secret stealth fighter jets called Talons for Capt. George Cummings (Sam Shepard, always a treat in military roles).

Then Cummings announces the addition of a fourth member of the team. It’s not a person, its EDI (Extreme Deep Invader), Eddie for short, a plane flown by artificial intelligence. Described as having “a brain like a quantum sponge” (where can I get one of those?), Eddie doesn’t do things by half measures: When it decides to download songs from the Web, it downloads every last one of them.

Just like the pilots in “Top Gun,” Eddie gets a nickname. The team calls him Tin Man, though, given the plane’s general shape and coloration, Dung Beetle might have been more appropriate. But no matter. Once his HAL-type voice pipes up and says, “It is good to be part of the squadron,” we all know that it’s just a matter of time before Eddie gets too big for his britches and starts to think he’s smarter than his human handlers.

“Stealth,” however, is not content to stop here. Perhaps fearful that such a clear story line would not fascinate, it adds on all manner of extraneous bits and pieces of plot until what results resembles an out-of-work screenwriter’s garage sale.

These add-ons include a ground combat sequence that looks left over from an old Korean War movie, a steal from George Bernard Shaw’s “Androcles and the Lion,” supersecret blather about air bases not on any map, even a pointless R&R; sequence likely included to get Biel and Lucas, whose characters are secretly sweet on each other, into flattering swimwear.

The script by veteran W.D. Richter also has its share of technical and military language: When someone says “hostile at 6 o’clock,” he’s not referring to evening drinks with the boss. As if they didn’t have enough to worry about, actors also have to be able to say lines like “Where’s the fire, skipper?” and “My fuel is low and half of Russia will be up here any minute” as if they had some connection to reality. It can’t be easy.

Finally, though, the diversion of aircraft acrobatics obviates the need to take anything anyone does or says too seriously. This is a summer fantasy, after all, and in this day and age, the notion that we have the skill to take out dangerous terrorist cells in the blink of an eye with zero collateral damage is one fantasy a lot of folks would like to buy into.

*

‘Stealth’

MPAA rating: PG-13 for intense action, some violence, brief strong language and innuendo

Times guidelines: Does not push the envelope

Released by Columbia Pictures. Director Rob Cohen. Producers Laura Ziskin, Mike Medavoy, Neal H. Moritz. Executive producers E. Bennett Walsh, Arnold W. Messer. Screenplay W.D. Richter. Cinematographer Dean Semler. Editor Stephen Rivkin. Costumes Lizzy Gardiner. Music BT. Production design J. Michael Riva, Jonathan Lee. Running time: 2 hours, 1 minute.

In general release.