Iron Eagle (1986)

Iron Eagle

Iron Eagle should receive 5 stars "hands down!" It's fast paced, high energy; I couldn't sit still! I even turned on my speakers for great amplification, wow! This is a great hero movie with plenty of action, and hits every emotion. Not one dull moment in the movie. I highly recommend it! June 18, 2008

Brings back a lot of memories

This is a great cheesy movie! I don't think I have to recommend this to you if you were a kid in the 80's. =D May 14, 2008

Iron Eagle Soars!

Jason Gedrick, Louis Gossett Jr., and Tim Thomerson star in this high-flying 80s action film about a pilot who is shot down and the lengths his son will go to save him.

Thomerson stars as Col. Ted Masters. He and his wingman are on a routine mission over the Mediterranean Sea when they are jumped by MIGs from a middle-eastern country. The name of the country is never given, but, due to the time when the movie was made, it can be assumed to be Libya. Masters and his wingman manage to shoot down three MIGs, but Masters himself is eventually shot down and captured.

Meanwhile, Ted's son Doug (Gedrick) has become a fairly good pilot himself. He and his friends have their own flying club, and they enjoy flying their Cessnas on the weekends. Doug has an enemy in school who challenges him to fly "the snake", a dangerous canyon near the air force base. Doug accepts and, even though someone messed with his plane, Doug still manages to win. However, his victory is short-lived, for he soon finds out about his father's capture and impending trial.

The U.S. Government is powerless to assist Doug's father, and Doug soon learns that his father has been found guilty of spying and is going to be hanged in three days. With no other options available to him, Doug concocts his own plan to fly in and free his father himself. He enlists the help of Col. "Chappy" Sinclair (Gossett). Chappy is a retired pilot who lives on the base. He's extremely reluctant to help Doug with his far-fetched plan but, after thinking it over, he decides to go along with it.

Now its up to Doug's friends to somehow come up with two fully-loaded F-16s with a full combat load, refueling schedules, approved flight plans, and other necessary logistics to pull the plan off. Sure enough, Doug's friends somehow manage to make all the necessary arrangements and Doug and Chappy are soon winging their way across the Med. Will they succeed in rescuing Doug's father, or will they be too late?

I enjoyed this movie a great deal. Granted, the story is extremely far-fetched, but the action sequences are very good. Gossett does a good job as Chappy, and Gedrick gives a good performance as Doug. Fans of great action-adventure movies won't want to miss Iron Eagle. May 12, 2008

The most enjoyable, least believable movie of all time

Little Doug Masters (Jason Gedrick) has an Air Force pilot for a father, an incredibly irresponsible father who has been allowing him to fly training missions since, evidently, Doug hit puberty. The kid has more simulator time than anyone on base (wherever that may be). He's so into flying that he has a club of fellow high school aviators - officers' kids - who take their personal planes out on the weekends for fun...and to race paint-huffing morons on dirt-bikes through treacherous mountains. He's a whiz at flying (but not acting). Doug's happy little world halts when he finds out that not only did his application to the Air Force Academy get denied, but his father was also shot down, captured, and scheduled for a hanging in an undisclosed Middle Eastern country.

Doug enlists the help of his flying buddies (two of which are Styles from Teen Wolf and the gay dude from Revenge of the Nerds) to hatch a rescue plan. Along the way he manages to get the help of a retired Air Force Colonel named Chappy Sinclair (Louis Gossett Jr.) who just happens to have flown with Doug's father. After the two find out that the U.S. government has their hands tied in red tape, Col. Chappy decides to put a plan into action. He'll require the considerable talents, connections, and tricks of each member of the flight club. They'll have to steal maps, get top secret armament information of the enemies, hack into government computers to get F16s with enough ammo (and flight plans) to take on an entire Arab country, and exploit every moron the Air Force could possible assemble on one facility in order to save Doug's father.

After all the training, the shenanigans, and the ubiquitous 80s montage in which Louis Gossett Jr. shakes it to an old jukebox, the training mission gets the go ahead, and it's up to Doug and Chappy to rescue Doug's father from the evil, Arab terrorists (and not face long-term prison when and if they get back).

If that isn't the most preposterous, far-fetched, Ben-Affleck-in-Armageddon-ridiculous premise for a movie, then someone has to fill me in on what tops it.

This movie is one of the most enjoyably improbable movies of all time. It's a classic from that period of the 80s when there seemed to be no rules, and movies were made for pure, silly entertainment. Shut your brain off for two hours and just enjoy the good guys getting the better of the bad guys in a movie less believable than James Van Der Beek's accent in Varsity Blues. April 8, 2008

Iron Eagle

Fun to watch again and again. Brings back the memories. Kind've corny, but still fun. March 12, 2008

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