Movie Review - The Rocketeer

The Rocketeer (1991)

Starring Bill Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton, Paul Sorvino, and Terry O'Quinn

Directed by Joe Johnston

I really liked this movie as an eleven year-old kid.  I had a t-shirt, a 3D comic book, and bought cds simply because they contained orchestral pieces of the score.  I was a big fan, and I'm happy to say that this is still a quality movie twenty years later.

The year is 1938.  The city is Los Angeles.  We join stunt pilot Cliff Secord (Bill Campbell) and his good friend and mechanic Peevy Peabody (Alan Arkin) as they discover a rocket pack that was left at their airfield after a mobster abandoned it there following a chase from FBI agents.  Cilff is thoroughly intrigued by the new invention and tests it out to great success.  However, this wouldn't be an adventure movie if it didn't contain some intrigue and that intrigue comes from Hollywood celebrity Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) who had hired mobster Eddie Valentine (Paul Sorvino) to bring him the rocket pack and Sinclair is none too happy that Valentine's men have let the pack fall into someone else's hands.  Of course, this being the 1930s, a dame is going to get in the way of things, causing some trouble for both Cliff and the mobsters.  In this flick, the dame role goes to Jennifer Connelly as aspiring actress Jenny Blake who, angered by her boyfriend Cliff, turns to the arms of the suave and debonair (and unknowingly seedy) Neville Sinclair.

There's certainly an Indiana Jones vibe going on in The Rocketeer simply because they're both comic booky, 1930s-serial-esque adventure tales.  While Spielberg's series certainly travels the globe, The Rocketeer stays firmly planted in Hollywood, however the story certainly takes on a worldly tone in ways that I won't spoil here.   Director Joe Johnston (who also directed such classics from my childhood as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Jumanji) does a nice job here of creating the kind of flick that any eleven year-old boy (or any old man remembering his childhood days) would love to watch.  The film doesn't contain a bad performance as everyone from the main cast to the supporting does a really solid job.

In other words, it was very nice to see that this flick showed that I had some taste in movies as a young kid.

The RyMickey Rating:  B