‘Phoenix’ crashes and burns

“The Flight of the Phoenix” takes its title from a Greek myth about a bird that is reborn after death by fire, resurrected from its smoldering remains.

Maybe the studio should try something similar with the film itself: burn the prints and hope a better movie rises out of the ashes.

A painfully incompetent remake of a 1965 James Stewart adventure, the flick follows a group of plane crash survivors stranded in the Gobi desert. Their only chance for survival lies in building a new vehicle from the wreckage of the old one. Those who want to see people working circular saws while rock anthems scream on the soundtrack are better off tuning in to the Discovery Channel.

Throughout the “story,” bad directorial choices turn dramatic incidents comedic. When a character is killed in a gun battle with desert nomads, he whooshes up and over in slow motion, like a back-flipping circus performer. The movie was seven years in the making, produced by William Aldrich, whose father, Robert, helmed the original. It’s one of those pictures that has been developed to death. And while photographer-turned-director John Moore (“Behind Enemy Lines”) has a background as a shutterbug, which manifests in some entrancing desert imagery, he’s a painfully poor storyteller.

Dennis Quaid leads an unspectacular ensemble that includes model-turned-thespian Tyrese Gibson, rapper-turned-thespian Sticky Fingaz, once-promising character actor Giovanni Ribisi and, serving as a token female performer, Miranda Otto (“Lord of the Rings”).

Quaid plays a cocky airman who believes he can fly right into a sandstorm without consequence. Of course he’s wrong, and the plane goes down in an intensely detailed crash sequence that’s the best thing about the movie.