Wolfgang Petersen locks a president and a terrorist inside a 747 and lets them fight for the plane. It is fast, brutal and well built, with a fine Gary Oldman; the flag-waving and the digital flying have dated, the fights have not.
Wolfgang Petersen made his name sealing men inside a submarine in Das Boot (1981), and here he does it again with a larger vessel and a smaller crew. Russian ultranationalists seize the presidential aircraft, the president declines to leave it, and for most of 124 minutes the film is a fight for a plane conducted from the baggage hold upwards. It is a brisk, hard, well-made thriller with a first-rate villain and a star doing exactly what he is for. It is also loud about its flag, and some of its flying has aged poorly. We had a good time.
Harrison Ford plays President James Marshall as a decorated veteran who has just told a Moscow banquet that his country will no longer negotiate with terrorists, and the film spends two hours testing whether he meant it. Ford does not do swagger; he does worry, and the sight of him crouched among the luggage, bleeding, trying to make a mobile phone work, is the most persuasive thing here. Gary Oldman’s Ivan Korshunov is the other reason to watch. He plays the hijacker as a believer rather than a thug, a man who weeps for his homeland while holding a pistol to someone’s temple, and he gives every threat a courtesy that makes it worse.
William Sandell’s set is the film’s best idea. The aircraft is built as a stack of rooms, conference room and press cabin above, galley and baggage hold below, with ducts and a rear ramp between, so we always know where everyone is and what is overhead. Michael Ballhaus lights the upper deck in the beige of a good hotel and the hold in hard blue work-light, and he keeps the camera low, under the ceilings, so the fights are elbows and headrests rather than choreography. When a body goes through the cabin it hits things.
Jerry Goldsmith’s score is brass and snare drum, a march that announces itself as patriotic before anyone has spoken, and it is laid on thick. We will own this: when it swelled under the president’s speech near the start we felt the lump in the throat the film wanted, and then felt sheepish, because the speech itself is a greeting card. Richard Francis-Bruce cuts between the plane, the White House situation room and the fighter escort, and he is good at the plane and dutiful about the rest. The Washington scenes give Glenn Close, as Vice President Kathryn Bennett, a table of men to stare down, and Dean Stockwell as the one who thinks her chair should be his. Close is good at saying no quietly, and the script gives her little else to say.
Petersen is good at the dreadful business of waiting. The scenes in which Korshunov telephones Washington with a hostage in front of him and a deadline in his voice had us properly tense, because Oldman never raises his voice and Petersen does not cut away from the faces. The trouble arrives when the film leaves the cabin. The exterior shots of the aircraft and the mid-air set pieces late on are digital work that has not survived the years; the plane banks like a model and the sky behind it looks painted. Andrew W. Marlowe’s script also likes to stop for a sermon, so that nobody fires a shot without first explaining what America stands for.
Wendy Crewson and Liesel Pritzker Simmons, as the First Lady and the president’s daughter, are given a hostage’s job and do it with dignity. William H. Macy’s Major Caldwell is the one soldier aboard who behaves like one. Jürgen Prochnow, Petersen’s submarine captain from Das Boot, appears as the jailed general whose freedom the hijackers demand, mostly in a cell, and it is good to see him. Against Petersen’s own record this is sturdier than In the Line of Fire (1993) as a machine and far shallower than Das Boot as a film. It does not have a thought in its head beyond the next door.
See it for the hold, for Oldman, and for Ford looking frightened and carrying on anyway. Watch it with the sound a notch down, since Goldsmith does not need the help. It runs 124 minutes and carries a 15; the violence is close and nasty, and the film is better for not pretending otherwise.
