director
Wolfgang
Petersen
screenwriter
Andrew
W. Marlowe
producers
Armyan Bernstein
Gail Katz
Wolfgang Petersen
Jon Shestack
cinematographer
Michael Ballhaus
music
Jerry Goldsmith
editor
Richard Francis-Bruce
cast
Harrison Ford (President James Marshall)
Gary Oldman (Egor Korshunov)
Glenn Close (Vice President Bennett)
Wendy Crewson (Grace Marshall)
Liesel Matthews (Alice Marshall)
Paul Guilfoyle (Shepherd)
Xander Berkeley (Agent Gibbs)
William H. Macy (Major Caldwell)
Dean Stockwell (Walter Dean)
Tom Everett (Jack Doherty)
Jürgen Prochnow (General Ivan Radek)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 124m
u.s.
release: July 25, 1997
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other wolfgang
petersen films
reviewed on this website:
- the
perfect storm
- troy
|
It's
probably unwise to trust our response to a movie in mid-summer,
when our brains have been so battered by big, stupid blockbusters
that any film that isn't blatantly moronic looks like a masterpiece.
(How else to explain the second-coming-of-Gump
accolades for Contact?)
Yet I should admit I had a good time at Air Force One,
the latest Die Hard knock-off. The movie is derivative
and by-the-numbers, with three separate scenes of Harrison Ford
dangling from an airplane where one scene would have sufficed,
but it has a confident snap as it goes about its business.
Ford, of course, is the President of the United States -- James
Marshall, a decorated Vietnam vet who's tough on terrorists --
and that's both a fantasy and a bitter joke. Boldly decisive,
stubbornly opposed to political maneuvering, honest and morally
righteous, this man would never be elected to any office
in America, let alone its highest. As the movie opens, a vicious
Russian dictator (Jurgen Prochnow) has just been captured and
imprisoned, and the gray heads of the United Nations convene
to congratulate Marshall on his part in the capture. He makes
a manly speech outlining his zero-tolerance approach to terrorism:
Never negotiate, never compromise in the face of evil.
The stage could be set for a drama in which the unyielding President
gets an ugly reality slap. But this is a summer action movie,
and so the hero's philosophy must be tested but never seriously
challenged. A group of terrorists, led by a scruffy Gary Oldman,
invade Air Force One and demand that the dictator be set free.
Oldman and his pack of stoic killers think that Marshall has
fled the plane in mid-air, by way of an escape pod (maybe they've
seen Escape
from New York), but the prez has decided to stay on the
plane, hiding and picking off terrorists. President Solo, President
Indy! What a man!
As the familiar cat-and-mouse plot unfolded, I stopped mourning
the lost possibilities and let myself enjoy the unapologetic
masculine thrills. Air Force One is always two steps away
from being a comedy, maybe because it takes itself so seriously.
Sometimes the seriousness works. The director, Wolfgang Petersen
(Das Boot, In the Line of Fire), has never treated
violence as a joke. Several of the gunfights are staged with
the frightening chaos of the real thing, and Petersen puts full
weight on the terror of a hostage who realizes, before our eyes,
that she's going to die. Oldman, in another great performance,
speaks to her with a curious tenderness and perhaps a little
sadness before he pulls the trigger.
The last act is a crisper (if sometimes less plausible) version
of Executive
Decision. Ford does his dangling, and the passengers
must be removed from the failing plane. Air Force One
abandons any pretense of drama and embraces the usual elaborate
summer-movie logistics. Ford stares evil in the eye and growls
that now-famous one-liner: Get off my plane! (It sounds
amusingly like Mel Gibson's Give me back my son!) As usual,
Ford drips with moral authority; he's good at it but also too
comfortable with it. I think he never got over the failure of
the only movie in which he took a chance -- The Mosquito Coast,
where he played a rigid, uncompromising man who never admitted
that he could be wrong. He plays the same role here, only now
we're supposed to cheer him on. |
