(rated PG-13)
When you’re the all time cowboy who has done it all on earth, it’s time to do it all in space. In the movie with the best cast of the year, it’s back in the year 1958 when four hotshot NASA test pilots, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner, are young, hot and ruling the world, destined to forge mankind’s path into space, until the government decided to ground Team Daedalus. Fast forward forty years later and “Houston we have a problem”. A really old one. James Cromwell (L A Confidential) calls upon Eastwood who is retired at home to help fix it. He in turn calls upon Garner a now retired really bad Preacher, Sutherland, who builds roller coasters and Jones who runs a joy ride prop plane company that gives thrills to teens looking for terror. It’s up to them to fix a Russian satellite Ikon that has suffered a systems failure that Russian officials insist will cause a total communications blackout in their country. The pressure on these aging underdogs come from flight director William Devane (Knots Landing) and Loren Dean as a rookie, know-it-all NASA astronaut pitted against age and body endurance. There’s lots of senior citizen jokes (the physical exam scene is priceless). Donald Sutherland is charming as the team flirt but it’s the balance, jokes and heart of this sympathetic yet comical team of geriatrics that make this movie a total blast (off). Incidentally, Eastwood originally thought the plot was too far fetched until John Glenn’s 1998 return to space helped change his mind.
