This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

It didn't even take 10 wasted minutes of my life to discover this hideous excuse for a film is less entertaining than watching paint dry. Perhaps to a totally stoned 4th grader it would be marginally interesting but then so would a trail of ants on the floor. No part of this debacle is even close to real or realistic. But I sure would like to get some of those binoculars that let people watch every part of an intercontinental air race. It never ceases to amaze me that movie makers who want to have airplanes in their film only rarely manage to dig up an actual pilot, or engineer or SOMEONE who isn't a total doofus, for technical advise. Another hard to believe fact is that they have the nerve to charge admission to crap like this. Boo, hiss.

During the opening credits, we see two young boys playing with toy airplanes.In the next scene, Grant Irvine, one of those boys, is in an airplane race. It is dangerous to refuel in the situation he is in, but he thinks it is more important to win than to be careful.Several people die as a result of the explosion, including some spectators.There is an investigation in which TV executive Chris Bannon doesn't tell the truth, and airplane racing is ended for the next four years.Four years later, there is racing again. And Bannon cares more about ratings than safety. After all, the rebroadcasts of that incident four years earlier got some of the best ratings the NTC network has ever seen.Grant can't race (or can he? We'll find out), but his brother Kevin (apparently the other boy from the opening credits) can. Grant can be the crew chief. Kevin flew in combat against Albanians, but despite his medals, his brother (who was in Desert Storm) doesn't see that war as worthy of respect. Both brothers appear interested in Trina, the pretty refueling pilot. Diedrich is a tough, competitive German pilot who reminds me of Drago in "Rocky IV".It's an exciting event watched by millions, and covered by DNN, PGD and MATV as well as NTC. And in this world, ratings information is available immediately. Furthermore, there is plenty of action to generate ratings. Bannon, of course, wants the pilots to be as reckless as possible so that maybe there will be a crash or something.It's funny to watch the poor people of Vladivostok (or whatever city that really is) reacting to the reckless pilots. I didn't know they had such pretty blonde women there. Hey, who cares, people in the movie say--it's Vladivostok.There is an amazing moral dilemma which is resolved in a way one might not expect. Perhaps some people here care about others more than winning.This isn't really my kind of movie, but I couldn't help but find the racing scenes exciting. Before the second race, a lot of scenes explained what was happening or getting ready to happen, but these wouldn't necessarily interest those who came here for action.I'm no expert, but it certainly looked like people knew what they were doing as they tried to make the action realistic. Those who know planes might have a different opinion. Two major weaknesses: the sound effects people relied heavily on Hanna Barbera (a good thing for someone like me who grew up on those cartoons), and the planes went all the way across Africa and Asia in no time flat, as if they used "Star Trek" worm holes or something. And I doubt medical information was accurate. There's no way someone could recover like that without a hospital and real doctors.No one watches a movie like this for the acting. I thought Adam Baldwin was particularly weak in some scenes. His character sounded knowledgeable as he did part of the race announcing for NTC, but he was no Jim McKay. He was, of course, an executive, so this may have been all right. But his best moments seemed to be limited to those exciting scenes where something dangerous was likely to generate ratings. He had a great poker face at one point where I thought he was delivering bad news--he wasn't.It's a B movie. Something exciting to watch if that's your style and you're not picky.

** HERE BE SPOILERS ** Recap: Transcon with Christopher Bannon (Baldwin) at the helm is the corporation in charge of the Air Races, which is exactly what it sounds like, a race with jet (fighter) planes. During a race Grant Irvine (Sabato Jr) is involved in an accident while refueling. His tanker plane goes up in flamer and his brother Kevin (Sutton) barely makes it out. A few fellow pilots and some spectators are not so fortunate, they are killed. An investigation bans Bannon from arranging Air Races and Grant's license is revoked. Four years later, the ban is lifted and Grant is recruited to work as crew chief aboard the tanker, while his brother Kevin will race...Comments: The entire story is one giant plot hole. It is easy to predict and not in any way consistent. Rules of the race are suddenly made up just to legitimize some twist everyone has seen coming a mile away, even if that rule completely contradicts the earlier story. The geographic errors are huge. In one stage they are supposed to go from Buenos Aires to Paris. When trouble arise the closest airfield is in Sri Lanka! Other stages of the races are (thankfully) ignored completely without even telling the viewer, it is impossible to know where the pilots are. Other long stretches that are shown are dull and boring, while crucial information and development is ignored and just told the viewer through commentary. The jets is never more than 10 feet from each other and frequently bump into each other, mostly without any effect. Even if two jets leave the group and fly a detour through a city they will still be in the lead when rejoining the group. Some stunts the pilots do actually had me thinking of Hot Shots, but while that was a comedy, this is trying to be a realistic action. What I'm trying to say is that the story is mostly boring, incomprehensible and full of obvious errors. In addition all jets are computer generated, and mostly poorly so, even while stationary on the ground. In conclusion, there are no reasons to see this movie, and lots of them to avoid it...2/10

(2008 edit: Try to keep in mind, while reading, that I was 16 when I wrote this.)I don't even know where to start. They slapped an F-16 Fighting Falcon patch on the guy's jacket, and yet an F-16 was never even shown in the flick. Of course, all the fake jets they used tried to *look* like F-16s - if they didn't have two engines. The oxygen masks they used looked like gas masks. Not only is the air THIN up there... it's TOXIC too! Wow, how futuristic. It's also impossible to fly they way they were. Ugh... wow, this movie is a black hole, a straw, a pump, a jet INTAKE, or (insert name of something that sucks worse here).That's not even talking about the horrid job they did with the audio and the "Infomercial" audience who, during one scene, mysteriously broke into astounding applause for no apparent reason. The slo-mo was there, the music was there... but why? Where's the situation?Speaking of slo-mo... uh... mind telling me WHY there was so much slo-mo? It's like "Woow, dude, this guy's, like... flying...".They also left the script hanging like a bunch of loose threads. During the second air refueling scene in the storm, they completely left out how the REST of the refuelings went. One went bad, they made a big deal over that, and never told us how the rest went. Last time I checked, they were running out of fuel with no other options, and...uh... so how did the rest get fuel? *sigh*I just can't stop thinking about why they bought that F-16 patch off eBay and yet never even used an F-16. Heck, they never even MENTIONED F-16s to give them credit in this movie. Also, there was another real-life fighter (what, an F-15 or F-18?) on the front cover... yet... not in the movie. All fake, computer-generated jets. I bet the writers went to, like, a Russian air force base, saw the "For Rent!" signs in the windows of the fighters, and said "Wow, a script idea!" :-)Then... oh jeez... that little part with the knocked-out pilot. Somehow or another, there's a Matrix-like vitals monitor (which use PUMPS as visuals for breathing...) - as if this were VR or something, and it says "Oh Man! This Dude's Dying!". They "dock" this jet inside the refueling plane, pull out the pilot, and do all this stuff to him, including sticking him, like a sword, with a gigantic syringe or something ("HEE-YA!"). That whole scene lost me. Oh well, onward.The ending? 4 pilots are already dead. Two are left to battle it out, and one of them goes down (not the hero of the movie, noooo). The hero of the movie thinks "oh no i couldn't possibly win this because my only competition's engine blew up! NOOO! I have GOT to eject a perfectly good plane, forfeit 25 MILLION bucks, and save one of the 5 pilots who went down! WOO!".... What were these writers thinking?! *sigh*This movie is my new official "Bad" benchmark.Well, gotta give the writers and director kudos for effort... *heh*