Before the USA officially joined the war in Europe, numerous young American men fought signed up for action as pilots in France’s Lafayette Escadrille air corps between 1916 and 1918.

Their story made cinema history in 1929 when William Wellman’s Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. That was followed in 1930 by both Howard Hawks’ The Dawn Patrol and Hell’s Angels, a blockbusting folly from plane-crazy zillionaire Howard Hughes.

Then it all went quiet on the WWI air-ace movie front until ‘World War One buff’ Tony Bill – acclaimed co-producer of The Sting and Taxi Driver; derided director of Christian Slater rom-bomb Untamed Heart – decided to take a shot at this project from Independence Day/The Patriot/Godzilla producer Dean Devlin.

The grimly determined James Franco (Spider-Man’s Green Goblin Jr) stars as Blaine Rawlings, a Texan cowpoke who feels compelled to fly for the Allies after his ranch is repossessed.

He arrives in Verdun, France, with several other Yankee greenhorns who all have something to prove and/or nothing to lose.

The rich one wants to make something of himself; the son of a slave wants to show gratitude to his adoptive country; the one who wants to make his military dad and sweetheart proud. There’s also the Bible-hugging one and the one with a mysterious background. And a lion.

With the exception of base commander Captain Thebault (Jean Reno) and resident Jerry-bagging ace Cassidy (Martin Henderson), all are played by unfamiliar faces. It still doesn’t take a genius to work out who’ll be around come Armistice Day.

Once trained, they find that - successful or not – all their missions have one thing in common: fewer planes come back than take off.

Boy’s Own adventures like this live and die by their action sequences. In that regard, Flyboys doesn’t disappoint.

A qualified pilot himself, Bill generates plenty of rat-a-tat excitement with a mixture of CGI and real biplane aerobatics. The ground combat scenes are convincing too.

But as Rawlings conducts his insipid romance with a local mademoiselle and the rest of the standard-issue characters sputter through two hours-plus of uninspiring, cliché-riddled flak, it’s clear that this is basically Single-Prop Top Gun.

Elliott Noble