Air Force One movie review & film summary (1997)

So. Since the movie has no macro surprises, does it have any micro ones? Has director Wolfgang Petersen ("Das Boot," "In The Line Of Fire") found lots of neat little touches to make the movie work on a minute-by-minute basis, while on the larger scale slogs to its preordained conclusion? Sorta, sometimes. There's some neat stuff about "Air Force One,'' although I don't know how much of it to believe. (Is it really bulletproof from the inside? Does it really have an escape pod onboard? Is there really a way to parachute out the back hatch? Can you really call Washington from Russia on a cell phone while airborne?) Many of the action scenes take place in the bowels of the jet, down in the galley and luggage areas.

There also is a counterplot set in Washington, where the vice president (Glenn Close) learns from the attorney general (Philip Baker Hall) that the president may be technically "incapacitated,'' and that she should consider taking over. And there are some good action sequences, in which people enter and leave airplanes at an altitude at which the practice is not recommended.

But mostly the movie is stapled together out of ingredients from many, many other films about presidents, terrorists, hijackings, hostages, airplanes, politics and cat-and-mouse chases. It is inevitable, for example, that the terrorists will separate and go poking around on their own, so that they can be picked off one at a time. It is inevitable that there will be Washington press conferences, so that bones of information can be thrown to the seething press. It is inevitable that there will be personality flare-ups among the lesser politicians, and dire comments by their advisers ("The element of surprise is a formidable weapon'').

The movie also resurrects that ancient and dependable standby, the Choosing of the Wires. In countless other movies, the bomb squad hesitates between "Red . . . or black? Red . . . or black''). This is a big-budget movie and presents us with five wires. It's an emergency, and the president needs to decide which two he should connect. See if you can guess the right two colors. The choices are green, yellow, red, white and blue.

The movie is well-served by the quality of the performances. Close is convincing as the vice president, and Gary Oldman has a couple of effective scenes as the terrorist ("Murder? You took 100,000 lives to save a nickel on the price of a gallon of gas.''). And Harrison Ford is steady and commanding as the president, even while we're asking ourselves if a middle-age chief executive would really be better at hand-to-hand combat than his Secret Service agents.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46aoKtllqS%2FpLGMqKWeZWFuhng%3D