One of the pilots is played by Joe Jonas, who fares better than some other pop stars this fall by making no real impression whatsoever.
#BEST FIGHTER PILOT MOVIES MOVIE#
In the meantime, these twentysomething kids have fun zooming above the local beaches in their F8F Bearcats and buzzing over the nearby suburbs, where Jesse lives with his wife (Christina Jackson, mostly called upon to look despondent while reading war letters, but there for the movie when it needs her) and their young daughter in a house next to a “nice” white neighbor who calls the cops on them at any opportunity. It’s 1950, “the big show” is over, and most of the pilots at the Navy’s Rhode Island base seem convinced that they were born too early or too late for their shot at heroism. Still, it’s peculiar that we first meet Jesse through Tom’s perspective, when he finds the first Black man he’ll ever fly with shouting epithets at himself in the bathroom mirror. There might have been a bit more for Majors to work with had “Devotion” focused solely on Jesse’s story, but - for reasons that become especially clear during the film’s closing text - any film made about Brown’s legacy had no choice but to make equal room for Hudner’s as well. It would likely be even more affecting if Majors and Powell were given better-defined characters to play, but such charismatic stars can be like human stereograms up there on the screen, capable of creating rich illusions of depth from even the simplest designs. Tom and Jesse never become the best of friends - another wrinkle that helps save “Devotion” from nose-diving straight into “The Blind Side” - but it’s genuinely affecting to see these two men come to discover what it means to count on each other, both during battle and beyond. It’s allyship at several hundred miles per hour, and in support of someone who showed more bravery just by getting into a plane than most pilots ever did while flying one. It doesn’t happen through big speeches or any sort of “I’m Spartacus!” moments, but rather through the relatively subtle process of a white guy (who doesn’t even know what he’s really fighting for) learning to recognize what his wingman really needs from him. By rendering the specifics of that particular mindfuck without too much hokum, Dillard’s film is able to trace how Tom earns Jesse’s trust. “Devotion” can be stiff and hackneyed at the best of times - it’s nothing if not a war movie that has seen too many other war movies - but it lifts a few inches off the ground whenever it locks in on the loneliness that Brown must have felt as he flew towards an aircraft carrier whose landing signal officer may have wanted him to crash, or soared in formation with people who might have been happy to shoot him down. Oscars 2023: Best Original Score Predictions 'Peaceful' Review: Catherine Deneuve and a Real-Life Oncologist Star in an Overwrought French Cancer Dramaģ5 Disturbing Foreign Films to Watch, from Gaspar Noé to Takashi Miike 'Enola Holmes 2' Review: Millie Bobby Brown's Teen Detective Gets an Elementary Sequel So far as Dillard’s film is concerned, the real enemy is the pernicious doubt that such racism inspires from its subject the disbelief that it leads Jesse to have in his own mettle, and the distrust that it engenders him to maintain in the men flying alongside him. The second is that “Devotion” has an identifiable enemy, whereas both “Top Gun” films made the dramatically agreeable decision to lock their heroes in dogfights with generic bad guys.īut that enemy isn’t just the Chinese ground forces who ultimately present Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner (ultra-likable “Maverick” alum Glen Powell) with their most dangerous threat, nor even the persistent racism that Jesse encounters from his fellow pilots at every stage of his naval career. Stewart’s thin screenplay would never have been able to find on its own. The first and most obvious of those strengths is Jonathan Majors, who infuses Jesse Brown with layers of warmth and nuance that Jake Crane and Jonathan A.H. Dillard’s staid and conventional pilot saga has a few unique advantages that allow it to stay airborne in such competitive skies. A downbeat Korean War drama about the friendship between the first Black aviator in Navy history and the Abercrombie model wingman who always had his side, “ Devotion” might suffer in the shadow of a mega-spectacle like “Top Gun: Maverick,” but J.D.
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