Herald rating: * * *
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, James Garner.
Director: Clint Eastwood.
Rating: PG, contains low-level offensive language.
Running time: 180 minutes.
Screening: Village Hoyts
Review: Graham Reid
"Mt Rushmore in space," said an office wit about this film, which has a cast of crumpled old guys as former astronauts called into service to get Nasa out of a sticky situation involving a Russian communications satellite.
This would all seem highly improbable - they are woefully unfit, are a cussed bunch of mavericks and Sutherland as the roguish womaniser is myopic - but early on two words are mentioned: John Glenn, the former astronaut who went up in the Space Shuttle after a 36-year absence from orbit.
Retired and tetchy Nasa engineer Frank Corvin (Eastwood, age 70, at his bilious best) gets the call because he's the only one who can repair the archaic guidance system on the Cold War relic about to plummet back to Earth.
It is also Corvin's chance at redemption because in 1958 the Team Daedalus group he was part of were training for the first space flight. They were dumped in favour of a monkey. There is pride to recover and a score to settle.
Corvin pulls together the old crew, they wheezily retrain and we have lift-off. Needless to say, the satellite contains a nasty surprise.
All this is told in director Eastwood's dry, understated way (typically the women parts are underwritten) and is shot through with gentle humour.
There's a Hollywood pecking order here: Eastwood and Jones (aged 53) take up most of the screen time, Sutherland (66) gets less, which is a shame because his eye-twinkling cheekiness is delight, and Garner (72) is woefully underused.
But this is better and less sentimental than it might have been. It's refreshing to see such grizzled faces on the big screen (Eastwood offsets their gnarled features by casting a buffed Val Kilmer lookalike as one of the other astronauts), and while it's improbable (did no one in Nasa wonder how a Russian satellite had an American guidance system?) this is a film of considerable self-deprecating humour if somewhat overlong in the formulaic middle hour.
One final thing. The session I attended had 25 minutes of ads and promos beforehand. Some of us, as Space Cowboys reminds, don't have that much time left to waste sitting around.
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