DIRECTED by Rob Cohen, the man behind XXX and The Fast and the Furious, Stealth looked to be a top flight (no pun intended!) movie, guaranteed to impress.

But this proves a director's previous successes don't guarantee anything, let alone blockbusters and after a fairly quiet run at the cinema I admit I shouldn't have expected anything more than mediocre.

Stealth stars Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx and Josh Lucas as a trio of top fighter pilots, selected as the best of the best - a similar idea to Top Gun.

They seem to all rub along quite nicely and successfully until the arrival of a new team-mate, an artificial intelligence-driven Stealth fighter. Inevitably, the new fighter goes AWOL - a similar idea to the film AI.

Add to this the classic conspiracy theory idea of top politicians manipulating the situation to their own advantage and killing off those who get in the way and there you have it.

By the end of it, the film is a combination of everything, with some really cliched scenes. The flying is relatively bland, as are the characters, and any sexual chemistry to add the stereotypical romantic storyline is non-existent.

All in all, for an action movie, this is disappointing.

ECB