Biggles (1986)

I have to admit that when I was a child in the 1970s, I devoured "Biggles" books. The timelines of the stories were all over the place, but the exciting adventures of himself and his loyal stalwarts made for fun, boy's own reading. Sadly, though, much of the writing of Capt. W.E. Johns required a child's imagination to make it work. Try to put in onto a big screen and it doesn't really succeed. This isn't really a film about "Biggles" so much as about the eye-candy "Jim" (Alex Hyde-White) who gets caught up in some time travelling escapades when visiting London that see him working for "Commodore Raymond" (Peter Cushing) and our eponymous hero (Neil Dickson) as they try to thwart a cunning Bosch plan to use a sonic weapon to devastating effect during the first world war. It's an adequate story this, with decent enough effects and plenty of dog-fights, but the attempts to drag these characters into the 1980s has only limited success. What works about the characters in the books seems almost parodied here, and despite a scene in a nunnery where the young "Jim" simply refuses to be parted from his ultra-velcro'd skimpy towel, the rest of the film is pretty unremarkable. I think it most unlikely that these stories will ever see the light of day now - they are hardly politically correct even in the most tolerant of households, so it is a bit of shame that this bland effort will be his only cinema outing. Even the presence of the genial Cushing cannot really lift this from the realms of, well, why?