“Firefox” is a high-tech spy thriller directed by and starring Clint Eastwood (“Dirty Harry”, “Absolute Power”) and I kind-of liked it. I say ‘kind-of’ because the first half of the film while not bad, left me feeling underwhelmed but thankfully the last half really picked things up and engaged me.

In “Firefox”, Eastwood stars as pilot Mitchell Gant and he’s on a mission to Russia to steal an advanced plane known as ‘Firefox’ because it can travel six times the speed of sound without being picked up by radar (it can also fire  weapons using the pilot’s thoughts too). It starts off as being like a spy/espionage picture as Gant infiltrates the Soviet Union but then turns into a great aviation warfare picture with a grand dog fight for the climax.

Eastwood always radiates toughness but here he plays a role that seems a lot more vulnerable than most (it’s arguably his most vulnerable role) because Gant suffers from hallucinations about his time in Vietnam; this adds a great deal of tension and Eastwood pulls it off superbly. The other characters are actually very forgettable as most of them run around in underground bunkers with flashing monitors surrounding them. They certainly don’t leave an impression like the guys in “Dr. Strangelove”.

While the first half has its moments where it seems good, the film gets a lot better after you first see the Firefox and that moment might be the film’s best. After that it’s high-flying action with terrific special effects as we see helicopters and many others thing get blown up but there’s enough strategy involved to make you really get behind it all. The dog fight near the end is almost as good as the ones in “Star Wars” and it’s done very much in the style of the ones seen in “Star Wars” with an emphasis on effects and high-tech manoeuvre rather than a more conventional dog fight seen in more realistic films but the principles remain the same.