FLIGHT OF BLACK ANGEL is another movie about a renegade fighter pilot taking the fight to the skies above America. There were a few of these films made throughout the 1990s, John Woo's BROKEN ARROW being the one I know the best. Although this one's a TV movie, it doesn't suffer from the trappings of that genre because it actually has some violent scenes of murder and destruction in it, so it's not one that plays it safe throughout.
I watched this film out of interest because it was an early effort from director Jonathan Mostow, later to make crowd-pleasers like BREAKDOWN and TERMINATOR 3. Mostow is hampered by a low budget in this one, but the story's interesting and I enjoyed the way that most of the material ends up taking place on the ground rather than in the skies. Peter Strauss is a dull hero character but William O'Leary is rather convincing as the out-of-his-mind pilot. The special effects again are limited in nature but there's enough meat in the surrounding scenes to make the whole thing frighteningly convincing in places.
