Codename Black Angel

My review was written in February 1991 after watching the movie on Showtime.

"Flight of Black Angel" is an unsettling, extremely taut thriller about a craze American fighter pilot with a tactical nuclear weapon board. This timely, cautionary tale is one of the better features presented as a direct-to-cable offering.

Billed as a "Showtime Original", film was made as an indie theatrical feature y Hess-Kallberg Associated, but was acquired by the pay-cable company and premieres via Showtime rather than in theaters.

A proper subtitle could be "He Came to Bomb Las Vegas", as young U. S. Air Force Academy pilot William O'Leary goes nuts kills his family and arms his plane to turn routine training exercises of young pilots into a game of death.

He also fakes the serial numbers on a computer requisition form and successfully thwarts other fail-safe systems to get a 50-megaton tactical nuclear weapon loaded onto his F-21 Mirage jet. He then arms it for a kamikaze run on the nation's gambling capital.

Helmer Jonathan Mostow, making a quantum leap here to quality from his debut Hess-Kallberg feature "Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers", directs with ruthless skill that makes this film the most disturbing of its type since "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer".

Clues gradually inform the viewer of the anti-hero's despair with the world and his religious fanaticism, believing himself to be a messianic angel of God out to destroy earthly corruption . O'Leary's subtle, understated acting does a terrific job of avoiding the maniac cliches of the genre (that persist right through the current feature "Silence of the Lambs") and creates the horror beneath a classical all-American boy facade.

As his commander and ultimate nemesis, top-billed Peter Strauss offers solid support. An affecting performance is turned in by Michelle Pawk as a young mother kidnapped by O'Leary along with her husband and baby.

The power of this film can be measured in its avoidance of the happy ending syndrome that afflicts modern screenplays. Though there are survivors to pick up the pieces, "Black Angel" packs a morbid wallop and genuine suspense as to the fate of the protagonists.

Good model work for explosions and effective use of aerial dogfight photography deserve high marks for this low-budgeter.

FLIGHT OF BLACK ANGEL is another movie about a renegade fighter pilot taking the fight to the skies above America. There were a few of these films made throughout the 1990s, John Woo's BROKEN ARROW being the one I know the best. Although this one's a TV movie, it doesn't suffer from the trappings of that genre because it actually has some violent scenes of murder and destruction in it, so it's not one that plays it safe throughout.

I watched this film out of interest because it was an early effort from director Jonathan Mostow, later to make crowd-pleasers like BREAKDOWN and TERMINATOR 3. Mostow is hampered by a low budget in this one, but the story's interesting and I enjoyed the way that most of the material ends up taking place on the ground rather than in the skies. Peter Strauss is a dull hero character but William O'Leary is rather convincing as the out-of-his-mind pilot. The special effects again are limited in nature but there's enough meat in the surrounding scenes to make the whole thing frighteningly convincing in places.

Before he had the big budget of U-571, director Jonathan Mostow proved back in 1991 that he has what it takes to create a gripping movie. I rented this because I was writing a screenplay with a similar premise. The aerial combat sequences here are just as -- if not more so -- thrilling as anything in TOP GUN. I wish they would have got someone else to play Cpt. Gordon aka "Black Angel" -- still, the thesp gets across a spooky desperation. The script doesn't fully explain his motivation, but it's clear he has some kind of God-complex. Peter Strauss is also believable as the Mentor.

If you like military or doomsday thrillers, this is worth a rent or watching on cable.

Also of note: screenwriters John Brancato and Mike Ferris (THE NET, THE GAME) are billed as assoc. producers, though I don't know what their role in the production was.

Just enough details to make this seem very real, and very possible.

Makes you wonder about the military phrase "routine training exercise" used in actual news stories.

No breaks in the action - and no subplots. This is straight action from beginning to end. Well worth watching.

In this TV movie, Peter Strauss is in charge of a training program for fighter pilots. His most dedicated student, WIlliam O'Leary, decides he has a divine mission to kill his parents and siblings, and then bomb Las Vegas.

Yes, it is a serious movie, although not in the sense of being important. The performances are all right, although I continually rolled my eyes at the basic situation, grown trite since the release of Fail-Safe. There's little to add to the basic plot, although there's a long discursion when O'Leary takes prisoner Michele Pawk, Michael Keys Hall, and their infant because they made the mistake of saying "What was that?" when he flew over the road at what looked like 30 feet. Lots of shots of what look like military jets flying across the screen in a quarter of a second.