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Grade: C

Verdict: A crash landing.

By BOB TOWNSEND
Cox News Service

A remake that's curiously faithful to Robert Aldrich's pretty good 1965 production of the same name, "Flight of the Phoenix" is more like a waddling turkey than a soaring bird.

It gloms on to a tried-and-true action disaster storyline -- namely, an unruly group of misfits gets stranded and needs to put aside differences in order to survive -- and holds on to a rather clever plot twist.

But the way director John Moore ("Behind Enemy Lines") and writers Scott Frank ("Minority Report") and Edward Burns ("Sidewalks of New York") try to juice up the aged script -- with pop music hits, an artfully etched CGI landscape and dialogue that veers between potty-mouthed one-liners and pseudo-philosophical speechifying -- only makes it feel all the more anachronistic. And the 2004 version of "Flight of the Phoenix" never achieves the slow-building tension of the original, which starred the perfectly glum and acerbic Jimmy Stewart.

Ripped and surly, Dennis Quaid stands in for Stewart as Frank Towns, the pilot of an oil company cargo plane sent to evacuate a wildcatting "bunch of zeroes" and their equipment from a botched exploration site in Mongolia. Shortly after take-off, Towns foolishly flies the overloaded silver C-119 straight into a hellacious sandstorm. And after the radio is destroyed and an engine breaks apart, he's forced to crash land the heap somewhere in the Gobi Desert. Worse yet, it's the middle of July, there's precious little water onboard, and the only food is canned peaches and hearts of palm.

Stewart had pressed dates to chew on. He also had the likes of Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch and Ernest Borgnine to act with. Quaid gets hip-hop model Tyrese Gibson as his co-pilot, and wispy but tough Miranda Otto ("Lord of the Rings"), edgy intellectual Hugh Laurie (Fox TV's "House") and rapper-turned-bad-actor Sticky Fingaz among the survivors. The best of the bunch is bleachy-haired and bespectacled Giovanni Ribisi, who plays Elliott, a furtive aircraft designer with a raspy voice and a plan to build a new plane from the wreckage.

Under Aldrich, "Flight of the Phoenix" engaged viewers with the simmering psychological conflicts between the characters. Moore heats things up with fistfights, gun battles, explosions, fast-motion and slow-motion camera work and set pieces choreographed to Massive Attack's "Angel" and OutKast's "Hey Ya!"

It's a lot more to look at and listen to. But by the time the Phoenix is finally poised to take flight (and the Mongol hordes are ready to rumble), there's really not much left to think about.