Film Review - Biggles (1986)

Biggles is based off the long running series of Books and stars Alex Hyde-White as Alex Ferguson, an American who finds himself travelling through a hole in time to World War 1 in 1917 where he meets the famous British pilot James "Biggles" Bigglesworth (Neil Dickson) but this won't be the only time the two will cross paths.

It's hard to know where to begin when describing this movie as quite frankly it just doesn't work at all, none of it really seems to pop and it feels two separate movies that have been pasted together to try and make a cohesive whole and as a result neither really stands out.

I mean all of the 1980's scenes are boring to watch with some not very funny comedy for the most part and the scenes in World War 1 which while they're quite good don't get much of a chance to shine for as soon as you get into those scenes and the story inside them ZAP! right back to the modern day stuff.

But the real problem with this movie is that Biggles himself doesn't feel like the star of his own movie, instead he feels like a supporting player to Ferguson as a lot of the film's main events revolve a lot more around him than around Biggles himself whose name is in the fucking title, I really wish the filmmakers had had the courage of their convictions and had made a proper Biggles movie.

And indeed that was the original idea for this movie, it was going to be a proper Biggles movie in the style of Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as being closer to the original books and that's what the aforementioned WW1 scenes give you the taste/promise of but the huge success of Back to the Future led to the shoehorning in of the time travel storyline which doesn't work at all and as a result you finish watching the movie feeling both cheated and angry which is how I felt.

However there are a couple of things I did like about this movie, the first of those as I said above are those scenes in WW1, they feel authentic, they're exciting to watch and they make you think "This is what I want from this movie" not pathetic jokes about Celebrity Dinners which have references to Schwarzenegger and Eastwood in them, give me a fucking break guys I don't want any of that in this movie, I want the good vs. evil, exciting adventure, aerial dogfights and brave heroes risking it all for Queen and Country.

The second is the film's theme song "Do You Want to be a Hero" by Jon Anderson which sadly is not used as effectively as it should be and the last thing is the performance by Peter Cushing as a retired British Colonel who brings some gravitas to the modern day scenes and delivers a very good performance but sadly he too feels underused which is a real shame as this would be his last ever role in a feature film.

So in closing, Biggles is not a film I enjoyed very much, it has a time travel storyline that feels shoehorned in, storylines and performances that are underused and underdeveloped and a general feeling of a film that is not only suffering an identity crisis but also feels like a missed opportunity in places, all involved should've either made a proper Biggles movie or not bothered at all, 1 out of 5.