Parents of unruly teenage boys will experience a profound and unsettling rush of dèja vu while watching “Stealth,” the latest octane-addled action spectacle from “XXX” director Rob Cohen.

Set in the near future, the movie — scripted by cult filmmaker W.D. Richter (“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai”) — envisions a high-tech U.S. Navy drone warplane that gets zapped by lightning and literally develops a mind of its own.

Dubbed “Tin Man” by its flesh-and-blood wingmen — played by Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel and Josh Lucas — the plane sulks, whines, downloads grating thrash-metal music off the Internet and impudently back-talks its elders with zippy rejoinders such as “Leave me alone!” and “I learned it from watching you!” If Stanley Kubrick had given HAL 9000 a snotty skate-rat nephew, this fixed-wing terror would be it.

Cohen's extreme-everything fan base (he also directed “The Fast and the Furious”) will undoubtedly appreciate the director's show of alienated-teen solidarity. Others will note the movie's tremendously puerile human component and think to themselves that Cohen makes Michael Bay look like Ingmar Bergman.

Lucas (“Sweet Home Alabama”) is the de facto leading man as Navy hotshot Lt. Ben Gannon, the centerpiece of an antiterrorist/special-ops flight wing conceived by an ambitious career officer (Sam Shepard) with shady Washington connections. We know his connections are shady because Cohen films Shepard's Washington co-conspirator through window blinds with a shaky wide-angle lens, suggesting an FBI stakeout or, perhaps, a camera operator with the yips.

Ben is a confirmed womanizer but likely has a romantic future with dishy fellow pilot Kara Wade (Biel) because they have the same taste in junk food and she's always looking at him meaningfully, the way a woman looks at a man she really likes or a pair of Manolo Blahniks she can't afford. With her supermodel cheekbones and Pantene tresses, Biel (“Summer Catch”) at first seems like an unlikely choice to play a tough Navy broad, but then — boom! — off comes the flight suit, revealing shoulders and biceps so yoked they could snap Heidi Klum in two.

Foxx (“Ray”) plays Henry Purcell, the third and final member of Gannon's airborne task force who spends most of the movie winking at mirrors and spouting junk metaphysics: “Three's a prime number,” Henry grouses when Tin Man makes the group a foursome. “The Holy Trinity. The Three Musketeers.” And so on. Unfortunately, three is also a crowd, auguring the sort of unpleasant fate that frequently befalls minority actors in B-grade genre movies, even when they've just won an Academy Award.

Sure enough, Tin Man's quantum brain goes haywire, forcing Ben to call a timeout when his computerized underling tries to bomb Russia without a parental permission slip (shades of “Fail Safe” to go with Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey”).

Airborne acrobatics follow: Aerial dogfights, exploding fuel zeppelins, bailouts over North Korea, capped by a semi-surprising plot twist that inspires the question: Will the Tin Man grow a heart? It all makes for the sort of wildly visceral, hormone-chugging diversion that we've come to expect from Cohen: Primo special effects, cracking pace, but lacking the refinement to warrant serious, blurb-worthy praise.

Certain thrash-loving teen audience members will probably disagree, never suspecting the movie's hidden aesthetic subtext: If it listens to Incubus long enough, even a machine will go insane.

‘Stealth’
Starring: Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard
Rating: PG-13 (intense action, some violence, brief profanity and innuendo) Running time: 121 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday in Valley theaters
Grade: C+