Air
Force One (1997)
action thriller
directed
by : Wolfgang Petersen
featuring
: Harrison Ford - Gary Oldman - Glenn Close - Wendy Crewson - Paul Guilfoyle
running
time : 1 hour 48 minutes
In this action drama, Harrison Ford plays
James Marshall, a onetime combat hero in the Vietnam War who is now President
of the United States. While visiting the former Soviet Union, Marshall
gives a speech in which he supports a get-tough attitude against both terrorists
and a right-wing general and war criminal from Kazakhstan imprisoned in
Moscow, earning him few friends in the Eastern Bloc. While flying back
to the United States aboard Air Force One, Marshall and his staff discover
that one of the journalists returning with them is actually Ivan Korshunov
(Gary Oldman), a Kazakhstani terrorist, who hijacks the plane with three
associates and holds the president hostage — with his wife and daughter
on board. Marshall must use his strength and intelligence to keep the terrorists
at bay and devise a plan to allow his family to escape to safety, while
on the ground the vice-president (Glenn Close), the secretary of defense
(Dean Stockwell), and the attorney general (Philip Baker Hall) grapple
over what to do and how much control to take in this crisis. Slam-bang
action sequences and plot twists fly fast and furious in this nail-biter
from director Wolfgang Petersen, who previously generated suspense under
water with Das Boot.
Air Force One tries to capitalize
on America's fascination with the mythic quality of U.S. presidents, inviting
viewers to imagine the frightening reversal of power if icons like Bill
Clinton or John F. Kennedy were slapped around by terrorists and made to
plead for their lives. In that way, Petersen's hijacking flick is occasionally
disturbing. Oldman, drawing from his extensive catalogue of sadistic villains,
presses Ford's face against instrument panels and imperils the virtue and
safety of both the First Lady and their daughter. But since the president
is Ford, we also get all the action hero nonsense, which includes him passing
among secret nooks and crannies of the plane, a device familiar to fans
of the airborne-action genre. The coup de grace is the hokey one-liner
from all the trailers, spat out by Ford while delivering a knockout punch:
"Get off my plane!" The film is notable, however, for casting Close as
a female vice president. Back in Washington, Close is saddled with one
of the greatest crises that can afflict a person in power: whether to enforce
the president's zero-tolerance policy or save his life by caving in. Her
stateliness is a tribute to the idea that the world is not run only by
butt-kicking commanders-in-chief.