AIR FORCE ONE
1997
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
Written by Andrew W. Marlowe
I suppose you could make Air Force One today, given that earlier this year Amazon did indeed release a movie called G20, which might've been better received if it they'd added the explicit subtitle We Forecast the Election Wrong; but as we discussed when we looked at Captain America: Brave New World, you still probably should not—if for no other reason, there just aren't many people capable of making good action thrillers these days anyway, and it's certainly not the only reason. For example, here's a telling factoid suggesting how Air Force One came from what amounts to a whole different country: one of the tracks from Jerry Goldsmith's score was used by the Trump campaign in 2016, and Air Force One producer Gail Katz described it as having been "hijacked" (cute) and told the campaign to discontinue its use (which of course it didn't). Maybe Katz would've have been uneasy with any candidate appropriating her movie, for it is patriotic but not political; but she really didn't want Trump to use it, to the extent that she barely remembered to rewrite her public demand letter to judiciously soften her movie's most quotable quote so it didn't come off like an actual death threat, and, to my mind, this all tracks, given that anyone who made Air Force One probably loves America, and would not have wished for its downfall, of which we're currently in the tenth year.
Yet in 1997, this was the stuff: rose-tinted glasses can diminish how polarized we already were—at least we didn't have so much of this fucking Internet yet—as well as how there are, in fact, what you'd call "politics" still embedded in the film, a sort of aspirational neoconversativism, albeit mostly because the movie needs to strike its righteously triumphant post-Cold War attitude and, even more, needs to motivate its plot (meanwhile, in 1997, popcorn movies that dealt in geopolitics didn't always perceive a need to pussyfoot around with fake countries and could often—although Air Force One doesn't, at least not on purpose*—even describe real political movements, hence that proto-neocon invocation of Saddam Hussein despite the movie having nothing to do with Iraq; incidentally, how's Top Gun: Maverick holding up for you?). Air Force One was still the fifth-highest grossing film of a year that included Titanic, which is such a freakish outlier it sort of doesn't count, and was even more profitable than its worldwide box office made it look, because an unusually (if predictably) high proportion of its box office was domestic—which isn't to dismiss its solid international gross, which is even more unimaginable today. Maybe it made it in just under the wire—Clinton got impeached in 1998—but nevertheless, it was a uniter, not a divider: it's a muscular movie about brutalizing evil foreigners, but a Democrat's in the White House and all is well, whereas even if you have a problem with him, because he's feminized the office by heeding his wife (well, her policy suggestions), or whatever your problem there was, Air Force One is certainly ready to salve that wound with a surfeit of good old-fashioned screen masculinity. And of course it really does help that in 1997, movies, even gimmicked-up bullshit like this one very blatantly is, were still real movies, made by people who gave a damn and were good at it. Though I am pondering if Air Force One is director Wolfgang Petersen's best English-language film; it's only that I haven't seen half of them, so I can't tell you for sure.
I've been assuming you know what Air Force One is, which is undoubtedly a safe assumption, but if I did need to describe it more concretely we could get it out of the way extremely quickly: you see, in 1988 a little movie called Die Hard came out, and, as it was awesome, it gave birth to an entire subgenre of action-thriller that could be brusquely summarized as "Die Hard and a Prepositional Phrase"; Air Force One, then, is Die Hard With the President. (Action content-wise, it's Die Hard On a Plane, In Which the Villains and Heroes Alike Are Shockingly Cavalier About Using Firearms.) I'm not even being that brusque, though: I am not sure there is any other Die Hard knock-off more brazenly patterned upon the specific plot beats and character dynamics of Die Hard, including Die Hard's own sequels, even Die Harder, which is distinct from this because it's Die Hard In an Airport.
So, in specifics, what we have is President James Marshall (Harrison Ford)—and while it's not one of those completely archetypal deals, Air Force One is completely disinterested in whether you remember anybody's name, and a few times I caught myself wondering if they did ever say his aloud, though I knew they must've—who has just masterminded, in conjunction with his Russian Federation counterpart (Alan Woolf), the daring capture of, if I understood it correctly, the dictator of Kazakhstan (Jurgen Prochnow, cameoing for his Das Boot director), who's (counterfacutally) a Soviet revanchist with significant support within Russia itself, waging some sort of restoration war from Astana. It's idiotically cartoonish in the execution and also not important; what is is that after Marshall, the first lady (Wendy Crewson), and their daughter (Liesel Matthews) conclude their visit to Moscow (why did they come along to a state apparently racked by civil war?), they board Air Force One to return home, but also along for the trip are a small cadre of "Russian journalists" who are actually hijackers, working in conjunction with a turncoat Secret Service agent (Xander Berkeley) and led by the neo-communist zealot Egor Korshunov (Gary Oldman), who plots to force Marshall to release his Kazakh leader lest he murder everyone. Things go awry for Korshunov in one respect alone: his team does not manage to capture the president, who has seemingly resorted to Air Force One's escape pod (not, it turns out, a real feature of the aircraft), thus abandoning his subordinates and at least one member of his cabinet, not to mention his wife and child, to the tender mercies of madman. Operating under this assumption, Korshunov begins negotiations with Vice President Kathryn Bennett (Glenn Close) back in Washington; but all is not as it seems, for Marshall did not cut and run, they launched only an empty pod, and he's still on the plane, and as soon as he runs across one of the hijackers, he's got himself a gun, and he's on his mission.
It's been done since, but what a novelty this was in '97! It's just one of those perfect premises that you hope is as good as it sounds, and, somewhat miraculously, it is. This is actually a very good Die Hard movie, which is to say a very good action-thriller, which I don't think was ever necessarily a given, all things considered. It shares with Die Hard a remarkable kind of tidiness that, even so, isn't aridity: it's actually a little ways in before the plane is hijacked, and maybe a surprisingly long time before Marshall comes back to bedevil his Hans Gruber, but it's not too long, and that part's filled with some very efficient and effective characterization (along with some tolerably efficient and effective exposition), and then, well, it's the hjacking itself and the first phase of Korshunov's "I kill a hostage every half-hour"-style negotations, which is by default exciting even if our hero hasn't reemerged yet. It's just very uncluttered (astonishingly, it actually cuts fat from Die Hard, if you could possibly call that "fat": the only major points from Die Hard that aren't in some way replicated—all the way down to the "I'm an American, and on your side!" bit in the form of the treacherous Secret Service man—are a bad marriage, the debilitation of the hero, and any measure of misdirection from the villains, i.e., the human parts), yet, despite paring things down to some perilously elemental levels, it's neither devoid of personality nor is it featurelessly dull action. Marshall, at least, has some conflict between his political aims and his duties as a husband and dad, tilting increasingly towards the latter; one thing I thought was clutter, regarding Bennett's "so am I in charge or what?" problem, is more just an excuse to introduce SecDef Walter Dean (Dean Stockwell) early, so that you can be primed later to hope she rips up those 25th Amendment incapacity papers he's drawn up, as a fist-pumping declaration of her faith in her president to kick commie ass. I am, probably, making it sound pretty featureless, so what does put some personality back in, ultimately, is just that outstanding cast list you must've noticed there.
Ford's naturally working inside some pretty narrow channels, but he makes a fine meal of it, starting from a baseline that suggests he doesn't enjoy being president very much (on as human a basis, in fact, as barely ever being left alone for sixty seconds at a time) but feels obligated to pursue what's right and just, which along with a spiky sense of humor dovetailing with Ford's persona going back to Star Wars, and along with Ford's general starpower, has the benefit us allowing us to like this president who, we sometimes suspect, might not even belong to our party, whichever that is (he has Republican-coded foreign policy, but Clinton-coded family composition, and then there's the additional matter of his female VP which, in '97, feels more Democrat-y). It's Ford more than anyone else that gives Marshall an arc, something permitted but hazily-defined by Andrew W. Marlowe's script—not that it's bad screenwriting for a script to just let the movie star do his job, though knowing that Kevin Costner was the star they wanted for Air Force One, it's fair to say Marlowe got lucky—and Ford takes Marshall, cleanly but with plenty of convolution, from a politician in-over-his-head with this kind of pulp heroism (he's a combat veteran, but not even this kind of combat**) to a place that shades, minute-by-minute, into full-throated action heroism, so that you're not surprised that by the end he's become American vengeance incarnate.
But it's not just Ford: Close has a pretty thankless task and aces it anyway, as the crisis-riven vice president facing both subtle and overt gendered challenges to her authority, wringing as much as possible out of a character whose main job is to blandly slow-walk the villain over the phone in a movie that's obviously not about their negotiations; and Oldman might not be surprising (he's this movie's Russian accent and one "EVAH-REE-BODY!" away from this being the same performance as in The Professional) but he's great, fully in tune with the needs of this movie and giving it a brittle-cool antagonism fracturing into maniacal fury. (It's only a pity that Oldman has the only true "clutter" scene in the whole affair, where he tries to explain political extremism to Marshall's daughter, and I just do not care about Korshunov's fairly self-evident motivations, only his temperament; back to Close, I have no articulable problem with Bennett dropping tear due to the stress of hearing people she knows die, except that if we're going to do that, then in this case it would be more interesting if she were Al Gore.) One of the film's very best scenes, the first, over-the-intercom confrontation between our hero and his adversary (its two threads effortlessly weaved together by editor Richard Francis-Bruce)—though I don't believe it's one of its most-discussed scenes—expands my "this action film is unreasonably well-acted" thesis right into the tertiary cast with Donna Bullock (man, this is a movie where William H. Macy is just part of the crowd, quite aptly-cast but not in these circumstances even particularly special); here, we get to see how accurately Korshunov has gauged this administration as a group of co-workers who like each other and how that can be used to hurt them, and how upsetting it is when a harmless woman dies, and how viscerally Ford reacts to it. It's frankly harrowing (a corresponding scene in Die Hard does not, in fact, occur to me) and weights Air Force One, a movie where certain characters have been marked as safe as any characters in film history, with what still feels like real consequence and real emotional danger.
Fortunately, Petersen is working tone like a champ, so that it doesn't feel out-of-bounds, either; because, ultimately, this is just fucking fun. It's actually amazing how close to self-parody the movie gets, and I imagine some viewers will still approach it as such, basically as camp—high camp or low camp is hard to say, but I think everyone involved must've been in on the "joke"—and I could not list how many moments there are that are keyed to "pure whooping delight," on the basis of how astoundingly straight-facedly corny they can get in their gestures towards rah-rah flag-waving, something that starts almost immediately thanks to Goldsmith attaching what amounts to Ken Burns's Civil War patriotic music to Marshall in a movie about the president shooting guys with a machinegun (meanwhile, this review's title is a reference to the color of wires in an avionics bay, which I think sums up the approach just as well). It is also, I hope, a truth self-evident that Die Hard must be made automatically hilarious when John McClane is the president of the United States. Air Force One knows how to be extremely cool, and extremely silly, and how to entwine the two till you don't even care which is which: it is, anyway, extremely cool when we see that empty pod and cut to Marshall climbing out of his hidey-hole above the pod bay in his plane, and we know shit's about to get real presidential; it's extremely silly when Ford's head pops up like a gopher in the very bottom-left corner of a shot, looking around to see if he sees a neo-communist's shadow, but that does not mean it's not still extremely cool.
And it would all be for naught if Petersen had not overseen a good action movie; he's made a pretty great one. The big caveat is some extraordinarily not-ready-for-prime-time 1997 CGI, made worse by a lot of contemptuous indifference to how air combat works, which I think should have at least contraindicated doing so many Goddamn air combat scenes. They're gamely trying to hide it in the nighttime dark, and not totally failing, but even this winds up weird when the sun rises and suddenly the exterior action is jarringly better, and it takes your brain several dizzy seconds to realize, oh, these are actually real planes and to some extent real people now, and we're doing compositing, which isn't by any means flawless but at least it's within a 1997's technological ambit. On the other hand, the approach does give us the fate of that KC-135, and I would certainly hate to lose that.
Otherwise, phenomenal—maybe just a half-quibble about how sometimes it doesn't feel, sensually-speaking, like it's "on a plane" but it is, after all, a big-ass 747, and I frankly don't even know***—but phenomenal. DP Michael Ballhaus is doing one sterling job keeping this more-or-less single-location thriller mobile, and surprisingly never runs out of ways to shoot a pretty limitingly linear environment; with Francis-Bruce, they're tending to build their scenes out of long suspense-intensifying tracking shots dedicated to whether Marshall really is trapped this time, and how he's going to get out of it anyway, with Petersen doling out all the critical information at pretty much always the right time, to goose us in the right way, but also being clever about packing frames with information, too, frequently managing multiple planes of action (remember that?) in practically every shot that isn't a punctuating close-up of Ford or Oldman or Close, despite the film's whole claustrophobic main setting seeming to preclude much possibility of that. So my single biggest problem with Air Force One is that you'd think Ballhaus had never heard of a split-diopter (and as I know this isn't true, I'm criticizing Petersen), because there must be forty separate shots here pleading for it, or at least deeper focus; but in this treatment—a grimness that makes the plane's native neutral colors slightly menacing, and grit and grain to cut against the goofball glossiness of the premise—even that rampant shallow focus doesn't find the imagery from disconnecting from itself, so that we're simply having our attention carefully shepherded.
The other big problem is that the movie's conflict climaxes—and this is close to an objective fact; "GET OFF MY PLANE" comes twenty minutes before it ends—with just a ton of stuff they felt honorbound to tie up, amounting to basically an entire fourth act's worth of not being able to land the plane!, and the truth is none of this is remotely bad, but events have shaken out in such a way that the movie's energy level has dropped by at least half. Except for that, Air Force One is virtually the perfect popcorn film; and for as well as it did, even as much as its reputation is fairly enduring for a rather dumb 90s actioner with jingoistic overtones, that this movie didn't come out on the actual Fourth of July weekend in 1997 can only be explained by TREASON.
Score: 9/10
*It's accidental prescience that the movie is about throwing Vladimir Putin out of a plane before he comes to power.
**He'll mention that he only flew "small planes, not jets," which makes you wonder what the hell war it was he was supposed to have fought in.
***Infintesimal fraction of a quibble: despite the nice bigness you still get from a 1997 blockbuster, the second-unit Moscow location shooting sucks, with "crowds" that clearly end right at the edge of the frame.
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