In the near future, Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx are America's best (and best-looking) pilots, assigned to fly a squadron of advanced, top-secret stealth fighters. They're full of piss and vinegar until they're assigned a fourth squad mate, an even more advanced prototype fighter that flies itself. Code-named EDI, the unmanned plane has studied the pilots' moves, assimilated their personalities and now rather condescendingly flies circles around them. EDI, their commander (Sam Shepard) tells them, is the future of aerial combat.
After lightning fries its wires, EDI begins to think for itself. Confident it's the hottest thing in the sky, and with a classified Pentagon wish list of global targets to choose from, EDI takes off on a worldwide demolition derby. Our heroes, standing up for human beings everywhere, spend the rest of the movie trying to reason with EDI or blow it out of the sky.
Stealth half believes it's making a serious exploration about technology's role in modern warfare. Does it save lives to send an unfeeling drone into combat instead of pilots, or do we risk turning war into an abstraction by leaning on machines that lack the human potential for moral judgment? But actually, the movie has more to say about Lucas' steel-plated abs, how well Biel fills a bikini, and Foxx's charisma with the ladies (yes, there is still time for a little R&R in Thailand amidst all the fly-jinks).
The real bad guys are neither the unnamed terrorists our planes are targeting nor EDI, which turns out to be more complicated than you'd think, though its motivations remain hazy. The villain is—no surprise—Shepard's stock, monomaniacal Naval commander, determined to make EDI work at any cost. (Wasn't Shepard once a serious playwright? Didn't he also give a great performance as test pilot Chuck Yeager? Nah ... couldn't be the same guy.)
Still, the effects are first-rate and the action is high-energy. When Stealth hits the home stretch it's part Behind Enemy Lines (can a downed pilot make it out of a hostile country?) and part Firefox (can a pilot steal an advanced warplane?). Or perhaps it's Top Gun meets the Herbie movies, with EDI as the lovable VW Bug with a mind of its own. It even calls to mind Every Which Way But Loose, with EDI filling in for the orangutan.