Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Lieutenant Burnett (Owen Wilson) and the United States Navy regulate in "Behind Enemy Lines." The film opens today.

The overhead view of an enormous American aircraft carrier rotates with a clicking noise from one side of the screen to the other. Radio static bursts along with the syncopated beats of fast and furious electronica.

The view shifts 1,000 times in the next 30 seconds: the tense blue glow of a Navy control room to the ripping, precise motions of the deck crew as it readies a growling F/A-18 for take off. Steam rises, radar panels swivel sharply back and forth, electrons pulse explosively through the super-power veins of the USS Carl Vinson.

Welcome to the latest exercise in military entertainment technology, "Behind Enemy Lines."

Like Rambo, Lieutenant Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson) is a complex, deeply motivated character with several genuine emotional facets to consider when one evaluates the role he plays in shaping his narrative.

Burnett, a Navy fighter pilot, has been flying over places whose names he can't pronounce for some time now, and he's getting tired of it. Bosnia just isn't doing it for him. He tells his commanding officer Admiral Reigart (Gene Hackman), "We're not fighting, we're watching." He came to blow stuff up, man, not sit on an aircraft carrier and eat Jell-o.

But Burnett, like Rambo, has a deep inner need to help people, which is why he wants to retire from the Navy and fly Bill Gates' private jet.

When it comes down to it, Burnett is a soldier in need of a mission. He's tired of the diplomatic way, the political way, and all this nonsense of NATO telling the Yankee fly boys how to run their aircraft carrier.

But then our hero gets shot down and chased around the freezing cold Balkan countryside by barking dogs and psychotic sharp-shooting commandos.

Burnett manages to evade and survive for the next couple of days, blowing up large parts of the already decimated Yugoslav landscape and almost, but not quite, getting shot about 100 million times.

Meanwhile NATO commander Piquet (Joaquim de Almeida), his fishy bad-guyness denoted by a thick foreign accent, insists that Reigart not go in to rescue Burnett because the plane went down while performing illegal reconnaissance, and the further exacerbation of the situation could push the region into all-out war and cost the lives of thousands.

Bastard! Those Portuguese, you gotta watch 'em like a hawk.

Of course Gene Hackman furrows his mature and manly brow, curses the powers that be and decides to go get Burnett anyway. Needless to say, we never find out whether those thousands of lives were lost.

While "Behind Enemy Lines" may have bitten off far more political context than it can chew, it's hardly an earnest statement about military directive overseas. Director John Moore was placed in command of "Behind Enemy Lines," because the producers liked his Sega commercial. And this film is little more than a commercial, with one clear message: Be all you can be.