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'Air Force One' never gets off the ground
July 28, 1997
Web posted at: 11:31 a.m. EDT (1531 GMT)
- Clip: "Missile Attack" (27 sec./1.2M QuickTime movie)
- Entire movie trailer (2:30 VXtreme streaming video)
From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- Harrison Ford has always been, and probably always will be, one of my favorite movie stars, but in recent years I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly why I feel this way. He's still highly charismatic, no doubt about it, but there's no avoiding the fact that he's slowly become something of a stick in the mud.
Gone forever, I suppose, are the endearingly sly grins and swaggering (but still self-deprecating) wit that carried the day in his best movies, "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." There was even a time when Ford displayed a highly commendable tendency to knock himself off the pedestal in his more serious-minded stuff, like "Witness."
Not anymore. In a nutshell, the guy has lost his sense of humor. "Air Force One" is yet another step in the degeneration of an acting style that used to serve as an antidote to Stallone and Schwarzenegger's steroid-pumped jingoism. By now, though, Ford's aw-shucks grin and cocky confrontational repartee has been replaced by a grimacing, finger-pointing task master who forever looks like he's catching kids smoking in the rest room. America wants a hero they can identify with, and he's decided to become the first action principal.
"Air Force One" is a pretty darn unbelievable movie, and not just because it expects us to buy the concept that a group of Russian terrorists (led by Gary Oldman) could sneak onto the most secure airplane in the world by pretending to be a TV camera crew. This is accomplished so easily, they probably could have dressed up like lobsters and had somebody push them in on a food cart. No, one of the more ludicrous things here is that Ford's President Marshall is a physically vigorous former Congressional Medal of Honor winner who gets mad when arguing international policy with his Cabinet and backs up his point by saying stuff like, "It's the right thing to do, and you know it!" Since when?!
Okay, okay. I'll accept a thoroughly implausible president (Ronald Reagan, anyone?), but there are more physics-ignoring situations in this movie than you can shake a slide rule at. I'm even willing to pretend that a man can successfully hide from 10 to 12 armed lunatics as they stalk around inside a jumbo jet, even though it's impossible. But when it comes to that same man hanging on with one hand while being dragged behind that same jumbo jet in mid-flight, I have to draw the line. Granted, I didn't see a speedometer, but the last time I was on a commercial airliner, it was moving faster than a tractor inner-tube bouncing along on a tow line behind the family speed boat.
As the movie begins, President Marshall has just announced that the American government will never negotiate with terrorists, so don't even try it, you terrorists, you. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that was already our policy. Anyway, this is supposed to give the story more urgency when Oldman and his cohorts suddenly jump up and start executing half the people on the plane. They want one of their leaders released from the local gulag so that they can start reasserting communism (as opposed to capitalism) in what Oldman actually refers to as "Mother Russia." Evidently, McDonald's has gotten to him.
During the initial big shoot-out, a sort of presidential space capsule is jettisoned from the plane. Oldman and his buddies think the president has gotten away, but they're wrong, of course. Ford, now in his trademark rumpled suit, is actually hiding behind a door or a mixing bowl or something, grimacing and breathing hard through his nostrils. Everyone is herded into a single room (including the first lady and the first daughter), while Oldman spitefully negotiates on a speaker phone with the vice president, played by Glenn Close.
Close has a completely thankless role, alternating between staring steely-eyed and crying itty-bitty vice presidential tears while Oldman selects and executes hostage after hostage. It's no big surprise that the stuff that goes on in the White House is nowhere near as interesting as what's taking place on the plane, but we sure do end up spending a lot of time down in D.C. anyway. (Dean Stockwell is also on hand as a Cabinet member who is arguing about the president's mental competence in this situation, as if the movie's gonna be canceled because Ford is under duress.)
It makes sense that the producers would enlist Wolfgang Peterson to direct, since he was so successful at creating tension in an enclosed environment in his masterful submarine epic, "Das Boot." The problem is that the plane is so spacious and accommodating, you start to feel like the most powerful people in the United States are being held hostage in a flying Howard Johnson's. There are a couple of well-staged shoot-outs, but this is pretty inoffensive, by-the-numbers stuff. Not as completely dumb as it could've been, but not as exciting, either.
Eventually, Peterson is forced to play summer movie hack, inserting as many computer generated plane lunges and aerial dogfights as humanly possible. My favorite effect is a big red digital read-out in the cockpit that evidently is the only instrument necessary to fly one of these babies. Every time we see it, it's telling us something different, information ranging from "PARACHUTE RAMP ACTIVATING" to "COUNTER MEASURES UNAVAILABLE." It never gets around to saying "ENOUGH ALREADY."
"Air Force One" has some profanity and is surprisingly violent, with more than a few point blank executions by Oldman. One killing of a bright, young woman is downright gleefully mean-spirited. Rated R. 125 minutes.
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- Air Force One - from Cinema1
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