Air Force One (1997)

God bless those United States, the old red white and blue, the stars n stripes, the most powerful country in the whole wide world!!

Anyway, this is pretty much your standard terrorist hijack setup with all the regular ingredients that you might expect. Take 'Passenger 57' 'Die Hard 2' and 'Executive Decision' blend them all together, make the one man army hero the President (no vest) and voila!.

This film does well mainly due the huge appeal of Ford and his epic back catalog of movies. His ever lasting rugged good looks, calm manly voice and likeable charisma (even without the fedora) is the stuff of silver screen legend.

The other reason this works so well is Oldman as the main Russian baddie. He's got the stereotypical goatee, a heavy accent and he's really mean, another good Eurotrash villain. Along with Ford that's two rock solid performances which keep the film glued together, without them this could easily have been a very average run of the mill action thriller.

Another thing the film shows you is how nice it is or would be to be President with his highly advanced personal airliner. Never realised how luxurious the interior of the plane is, from top to bottom its like a long narrow mansion. On top of that you also learn a few things about the plane and how cool it really is. Is there really an escape pod on board?

The sets for Air Force One all look top notch and the action is also darn good but its also pretty daft at times. Lots of gun fire in mid air, kinda silly as you'd think at least one might pierce the fuselage, especially with all the machine gun fire haha. Then of course you have the obligatory faceless Russian bad guys, god knows how many there were at first or how many got killed but it seemed to be lots. Ditto for Air Force One personnel, people getting mowed down all over the shop, no idea who they are. Little character development for the bad guys or good guys accept for the odd main roles naturally.

End of the day its your typical action flick cunningly disguised as trying to be something a bit more intelligent...but really its not. Still looks the biz today but the CGI sequence at the end is pretty bad looking I gotta be honest.

'nobody does this to the United States'




7/10