Air Force One (1997)
“How the hell did this happen? How the hell did they get Air Force One?” – Vice President Kathryn Bennett.
Air Force One (1997)
Directed by: Wolfgang Peterson
Written by: Andrew W. Marlowe
Starring: Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, Glenn Close
Back from the good old days, when every baddie in an American action movie was eastern European, comes the Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman led blockbuster Air Force One. First impressions of this film were: “Cool, this is basically Die Hard on a plane, with Harrison Ford being his badass hero self.” Second impressions were, “Actually, this movie has a million plot holes, what the hell were the writers thinking?” Final impressions, during the research for this movie, “What??? This got nominated for two Oscars? How did that happen?” So I’m a bit confused to be honest. It’s another kind-of-bad action movie with a lazy script, but it’s headlined by some incredible actors, who make it an entertaining watch.
Harrison Ford plays American President James Marshall, who has just made a trip to Russia to celebrate the capture of Kazakhstani dictator General Ivan Radek and reinforce the American stance that they will ‘not negotiate with terrorists’. However, on the flight home Air Force One is hijacked by Radek loyalists, headed by the fearsome Egor Korshunov (Oldman). Little do the terrorists know, Marshall (a veteran of the Vietnam War) will stop at nothing to save his staff and his family. Thus begins a game of cat-and-mouse between the terrorists and the President, as he tries to regain control of his plane.
So the themes are pretty obvious in this one – it is good versus evil, freedom versus terrorism, America versus…everyone else. It’s all disgustingly patriotic, with Marlowe writing the presidential character as a pin-up boy for American perfection. He’s a war veteran, loving husband and father, a champion of freedom, is not scared of baddies, and even has time to ask his staff who won the ball game. What a guy! The decision to cast Ford in this role is amazing in this respect, as the viewers come into the film with the baggage of him doing similar heroic things as Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and Jack Ryan in previous films.
A quick side-bar here. There have been a number of great movie presidents; James Marshall is up there, Thomas Whitmore in Independence Day is great, Morgan Freeman is fantastic as Tom Beck in Deep Impact, and Aaron Eckhart is good in the Olympus Has Fallen franchise. However, after the last four to ten years it’s pretty funny to think how ridiculous the Air Force One plot would be if the same thing happened to Trump or Biden. In this movie the whole country rallies around Marshall, with an ‘us against them’ mentality. If Trump or Biden get kidnapped? Nahhhhh. Half the country would be celebrating, the other half would be crying about it on Twitter.
The over-the-top megalomaniac extremist Korshunov is played brilliantly by Oldman. [Oldman, for any youngsters, is Sirius Black in the Harry potter franchise. For anyone else, he’s one of the best character actors of the last forty years, so you should definitely know who he is.] He’s the antithesis of Marshall –a violent extremist with no patience, no empathy and no mercy. The rest of the cast is rounded out with a plethora of A-grade acting talent including Glenn Close, William H. Macy, Phillip Baker Hall and Spencer Garrett, who in all honesty are kind of wasted saying things like “Do we have air support, Mr President?” Along with the cast, the best part of this movie is just dumbing yourself down and supporting the battle of good versus evil. Watching a fifty-five year old Harrison Ford tackling henchmen and yelling stuff like “GET OFF MY PLANE” is the sort of stupid action movie goodness you can enjoy, no matter how dumb the plot is.
And now to the bad parts of this movie – the plot holes throughout. These include but are not limited to (note, some minor spoilers here):
The biggest plot hole of the film: The terrorists are able to infiltrate the plane due to the help of a mole within the presidential security team. The mole not only goes on to do nothing for the rest of the movie (WHYYYYY?), his motivations for helping them are never revealed. He’s basically the key character in the movie, yet they don’t explain why he’s betraying his country and what he’s getting out of it. Beyond infuriating.
The president needs to learn how to do a bunch of things in the movie, including some extremely complex tasks such as electrical engineering and how to fly a plane. He learns these with a quick chat over a satellite phone – ridiculous.
The terrorists have taken Air Force One hostage in order to demand the release of General Radek, and the president keeps refusing. The first scene of the movie shows the US capture Radek with only a six-man squad – it looked pretty bloody easy. Why don’t they just release him then recapture him a week later? Doesn’t sound too difficult.
Anything to do with the press in this movie is pretty ridiculous. Not only do they reveal that Air Force One has been hijacked extremely early, the press are then allowed to listen to live audio feeds of what is happening on the plane and what the president is saying. Absolutely no chance they would be given this access.
In summary, the plot has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese, and it’s a lazy script. However, the cast is great and the movie follows a simplistic enough action movie formula – good versus evil, a few complications, and a fun-loving hero – that it’s a good enough hungover/sleepy Sunday evening movie.
Rating: 6.25/10