Review – Birds of Prey

The box for the DVD trumpets not the other triumphs of the director or the past accomplishments of the cast but rather the vita of the guy who did the aerial photography. I suppose that in a movie that’s mostly about helicopter chases, that’s a good thing. Certainly the chopper shots are the high point of this made-for-TV production from 1973 about an ex-Flying Tiger (David Jansen) now reduced to flying a traffic chopper. From his vantage point in the sky our hero witnesses a bank robbery. The robbers take a hostage and – as luck would have it – escape in a helicopter. The rest of the movie is chopper chase after chopper chase, punctuated occasionally by long stretches of pointless conversation. If you see this, consider fast-forwarding through the talking. Most of the dialogue is so stiff and contrived that it could have been written by Mamet and Tarantino, but only if both were having an especially bad day. See if desperate