An American action film directed by Wolfgang Petersen, starring Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman and Paul Guilfoyle.
The president's airplane takes off from Russia and terrorists posing as a news video crew start using guns. The president is supposedly ejected in an escape pod, but stays on the plane to begin a sequence of events to save the hostages from the terrorists.
Propaganda, pure and simple. They didn't even try to make it believable. The U.S. has rarely had physically fit presidents and the only terrorists are the ones hired by our government. So the plot is all shot to shit. The characters were anonymous and shallow like extras. All of them. Even Harrison Ford as the president was underdeveloped. He's way better off as Indiana Jones. The video featured heavy and obvious use of special effects, compositing and CG to achieve the outside airplane scenes. The audio was actually pretty cool. It had a triumphant "America always wins" main theme in the soundtrack and I could hear what everyone was saying. When the only positive thing I can say about a film is about the audio, that qualifies as a bad rating. DO NOT WATCH!!!
An American film noir thriller directed by Paul Guilfoyle.
A hotel in South America is the scene of multiple shootings as one man tries to get paid for illegal business, a man on the run from a landlord after sleeping with the landlord's wife shows up shot and a nuclear scientist meets his daughter. The remaining characters board a ship for the United States, only to find that it has a bomb on it.
The plot was complex, yet coherent. A little bit of espionage and hidden identities went on, but still the characters were good and were provided with back-stories. The only thing missing was some style. I would have liked to see some creative use of the camera to really make it great. Special effects were obviously not a plausible option in the era in which this film was made. The video and audio showed their age, but when a film is interesting, those types of things can easily be overlooked. This is another very watchable old public domain film. I'm rating it adequate. Who cares that the director's name sounds like oil used on a grandmother... (Metalocalypse) whatever.
