"Sky Captain” flies high

”Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” is now available on video and DVD.

Imagine the 15 or 20 minute climax of the generic action movie, the part that saturates the trailers; the part with the most extensive use of explosions, sweeping camera shots, stunt doubles and special effects; the part that most people came to the movie to see. String a series these nonsensical, indulgent passages into a feature length extravaganza and voilà: "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” is born.

The archetypal secret agent, street racing, natural disaster or intergalactic flick draws crowds with its bombs and bombasticity, yet most of the running time is bogged down with advancing some thrown together plot and developing predictably unrealistic characters. "Sky Captain” throws this tradition out the window. Instead of insincerely pretending that the action advances the plot, it unapologetically uses the plot to advance the action.

But the film goes farther than that, using a broad pallet of cinematic and technological tools to add excitement and color. Filmed in front of a green screen, allowing for the sweeping camera shots, vibrant backgrounds brimming with contrast and what can only be described as a "fuzzing" effect, the movie is not bound by the traditional laws of set design. There is a comic-book-like exaggeration throughout, with a soundtrack reminiscent of a 1950s superhero movie. The vibe is somewhere between that of old "Superman” movies and the old ”Batman” cartoons. With the story opened through newspaper headlines, and only the bare minimum of dialogue, it is easy to imagine the speech balloons and the word "thwack” surrounded by jagged yellow lines. The plot, such as it is, flows in the comic cliché. Ambitious reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) receives two vials from a mysterious scientist, who is later murdered by an assassin with superhuman strength and a staff that shoots energy beams. She joins forces with ex-romantic interest and earth's last hope Joe "Sky Captain" Sullivan (Jude Law) as they investigate the mystery and save the world from Dr. Totenkopf's doomsday device, as well as from his wide array of robots. The heroes also team up with technical genius Dex (Giovanni Ribisi) and British military captain Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie).

"Sky Captain's” defining feature is its how utterly ridiculous it is. The story begins with skyscraper-sized automatons storming the streets of New York shooting electric rays at the ground to uncover and steal generators for the construction of Totenkopf's doomsday device on an unmarked island. Other alleged 1930s technology includes propeller planes equipped with grappling hooks, magnetic bombs and underwater flight capabilities, all types of robots (birdlike robot-planes, serpent-like robot-soldiers, underwater robot-tanks), lots of underwater explosions (yes, they still make fireballs), underwater jetpacks, electric blasts that take off a person's flesh but leave their skeleton intact, a propeller-powered flying aircraft carrier, a metal-melting, handheld ray-gun, Shangri-La, a modern day Noah's Ark and lots and lots of dynamite. And the film wouldn't be complete without the classic axiom: "Why won't you die?”

Obviously "Sky Captain” is not an Oscar worthy film. It is, however, shamelessly entertaining: an absurd explosion-ridded action flick. The key to the film's success is that it revels in its immaturity instead of trying to hide it.

This film is rated PG for sequences of stylized sci-fi violence and brief mild language. It runs 106 minutes.