I saw this film when it originally came out in the theaters...well over 30 years ago. I'd enjoyed it, but times have changed, I have changed and technology has changed...so do I still think it's a decent movie? Well, surprisingly, yes...it still is pretty good.The film is a real change of pace for Clint Eastwood. In this one, he plays a Vietnam War fighter pilot who is called out of reserves to help his country. They need an excellent pilot who can think in Russian to go into the USSR for a covert operation....to steal the Firefox fighter jet!! Why is it that important? Well, because they plane can apparently do about mach 6 AND it has a new neural interface...and it's much more advanced than American fighters. Much of the film consists of the mission getting into the Soviet Union and then to the plane. To me, this was the most interesting part. Then, the final third or so of the film is flying the plane home...and avoiding all the missiles and the other Firefox fighter. This was amazingly made for 1982 but does look a bit dated today. You can't blame anyone for this...CGI technology just has improved tremendously since then. Overall, it's an exciting film and one that is far deeper and more interesting than a standard Eastwood shoot 'em up picture. Worth seeing.By the way, although the film is mostly extremely well made, in the first of many (too many) flashback scenes, Eastwood's Phantom II jet turns into a Thunderchief fighter-bomber. This was a pretty sloppy use of stock footage.

I can see how some might think it becomes slow at times but I was so immersed in the suspense I did not notice it. The script, screen writing, and acting were all top notch. The action at the end is tough to beat. Better than any other spy thriller I have seen before. Highly recommend.

I really like this film, its a diverting, high tech, cold war thriller, which entertainingly subverts many of the tropes of spy and espionage movies of the time.It reasonably translates its source material intact to the screen, that being Craig Thomas's novel of the same name and manages to juggle the sci-fi / thriller genres, whilst allowing Clint to add a new facet to his tough guy persona. Being a long time Clint fan, its significant to me, as its his first movie i saw at the cinema, also as it was the first AA certificate film i manage to obtain admittance to here in the UK. Clint plays Mitchell Gant, a former USAF Major who is "encouraged" by the CIA to undertake a mission into cold war era Russia to steal one of the new fighter plane prototypes the Soviets have developed. The plane in question is the MiG-31, a hypersonic aircraft with revolutionary new stealth and combat capabilities. Handicapped by post traumatic stress disorder and a lack of intelligence mission experience, Gant must successfully steal the aircraft, failure would mean a dangerous shift in the balance of World power to the USSR.Can Gant pull off this daring heist? Well i'd be shocked if there's anyone reading this who doesn't know the answer by now, but thats the charm of this movie, its re-watch value, i feel, is significant and it makes a great "beer and pizza" night in movie.There are elements that date it, foremost the long gone cold war setting, some people may cite the miniature based special effects. These are primarily in the last third of the movie, some may claim they look a little dated in our whizzo CGI age, but i call foul on that. The effects have nice weight and heft to them that CGI still cant muster and the dramatic effects of Firefox's hypersonic footprint, make anything in modern movies look positively arthritic, well I think so anyway.The cast are all getting stuck into their roles, particularly Warren Clarke (who passed away recently and prompted me to write this today) who plays a disgruntled Russian dissident and underground operative.Firefox is a film that didn't perform financially as well as it may at the time of its release, but 1982 was a year over shadowed by ET and most things that year followed on that movies coat tails.Its a nice little thriller, out of a time where you knew where the bad guys were and could generally see them coming and its nice to immerse yourself in the nostalgia of that from time to time. There was a follow up novel written by Thomas, Firefox Down, which is a thumping good read, it never followed its precursor to the screen and would now seem a little out of its time if it did, thats a shame. I recommend Firefox, as a great thriller, sci-fi, espionage, action movie, if you can imagine such a thing and if you cant, then just think in Russian!

I was in basic training in the Army when this movie came out. This was back in the 80's when we hated the Russians. Here I was sitting in an Army theater in Ft Sill, OK watching Clint kick some Ruskie tails. At the end I was in this crowd of closely shaved hot heads cheering it all on. Compared to today the special effects are slack and the scenes hardly believable. That did not matter way back then. Clint had that classic 'eyeball jitter' look and that's all that mattered. This movie is perfect for some gold old Sunday afternoon fun when the wife and kids are out somewhere and you are hanging out with the dog on the couch.