Panique sur le vol 285

Slick, well paced and sharply played, H:F285 is a competent and satisfying romp. Yes, it's just a re-hash of the Airport genre, but it manages to look and feel fresh thanks to a cast of actual actors (remember them?) and restrained direction that never attempts to overstep the modest budget.

The vast majority of the action takes place in the "forty feet long, thirty feet wide" cinema variety plane interior, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing as it induces mild viewer cabin fever after an hour or so.

If you enjoy watching sweaty balding A list actors stripping down to their vests and and blowing up, well, everything, then this isn't for you. However, if you enjoy character interplay, building tension that actually gets you involved in the story, and restrained - by Hollywood standards - resolution, give it a spin.

First of all, completely ignore the other comments here. This film is BAD. Trust me. The direction is limp, the script embarrassing, the sets flimsy, and I haven't even got to the actors yet. Anthony Michael Hall will always be remembered for The Breakfast Club and Weird Science - he's OK at being a geeky teen, but a menacing hijacker? He's about as intimidating as my pants. And then there's Ally Sheedy. Perhaps she's had more of a career than Anthony, but that doesn't mean she's a good actor. To be fair though, its not like she has much to work with here.

OK, the film. Its like Turbulence v Passenger 57, except made for £2.50. If you want to watch a cheesy Hollywood airplane film that actually creates some tension, go and watch Executive Decision. At least you get to see Steven Seagal get creamed.

This film is not bad, but it had a lot of cliche characters and cliche events, making it fairly predictable through most of it. However, it was interesting enough that I was able to stay with it even though I doubt I'll remember it for long.

This is one of those films that feature an airplane hijacking where the terrorist want money, lots of money! Of course, pretty sure the only place this scenario happens is in movies or in this case television movies because what would be the point of murdering people to get your point across when all that is going to do is make you more wanted and hunted than if you like embezzle some money or go through the backdoor in a computer program to steal some money. Like all films of this type we get stars that are billed higher in the cast than others and the ones at the top literally do nothing compared to those lower on the cast list!

The story, a convicted murder is put on a plane of people just wanting to head to their locale. He is deadly, a known killer so lets assign two people to guard him and lets put him in the same cabin as everyone else. Well he has friends, because murders always work together so they can hold people hostage and so he is freed and he wants to head to Dallas and he wants 20 million in bonds for the lives of the people. Just give him the damn things, not like they are untraceable assets, I think you can even render them useless if you want. No, they just have elaborate plans, besides the terrorist is an idiot and literally lets a passenger talk him into releasing half the passengers. Should of offered him muffins, he may have let the whole lot of them go!

The casting is what you would expect. We have James Brolin looking quite disinterested and Michael Grossman who looks only mildly more interested than Charles. You get the gun toting lunatic of the Police Academy films playing a lunatic Vietnam vet afraid of flying, you have Anthony Michael Hall playing the terrorist in a very unconvincing manner and Ally Sheedy is a gym teacher who also is a hostage negotiator or something...

The film is your standard television movie fare where there is not enough in the budget to have a standard plane crash, plus you had to pay those stars to kind of just sit there! Then you have the terrorist who really are dumb and obviously don't think things through. Ask yourself, have you ever seen anyone get away with a crime like this? Well, they did in the movie Quick Change, but that group was led by Bill Murry, not the geeky member of the brat pack!

Do keep in mind that this isn't a big budget Hollywood production. It was a made for TV movie intended to give a couple of hours of entertainment while you sit on the couch watching the tube in the days before Netflix and Amazon, etc. It needs to be judged by that standard. And looked at it in that way, it's passable. It's reasonably suspenseful, although not especially original. It's another hijack movie that depends on all sorts of things: somehow the prisoner being escorted on a commercial flight managed to get word out to his accomplices of exactly which flight he was going to be on. And it depends on the FBI agents guarding him being complete dunces who seem far too easily overcome. But you have to accept all that or you won't have a movie. Somehow the hijackers have to take over the plane, after all. So - OK. I thought the performances here were just a little bit bland - there seemed to be surprisingly little emotion from those portraying the passengers, who you'd think would be a little more panicky at the presence of three hijackers, all of whom have guns and one of whom has a bomb? But there's intrigue in how this is all going to play out that was sufficiently interesting to keep me watching.

Now, I've found that every TV movie of this type has some sort of sub-theme going on. Here, there were a whole lot of variations on what you might call the complexities of male-female relationships. One of the passengers has a tense relationship with his wife. The head FBI agent on the ground has a complicated relationship with the female hostage negotiator. The leader of the hijackers has his lover among his accomplices, and she's a little too kind for his tastes every now and then. The female pilot and male co-pilot of the plane are former lovers who find sharing the cockpit a bit awkward. There was just a lot of this - and it was very noticeable and even a little bit funny.

I didn't find this to be a bad movie; I didn't feel at all as if I had wasted my time by watching it. (6/10)