Panique sur le vol 285

James Brolin, Aley Sheeny, Perry King, Michael Gross & Anthony Michael Hall as the EVIL Hijacker! Not bad & cring worthy moments! Watch it & enjoy!

I originally watched this movie because I'm a HUGE Breakfast club fan and I wanted to see Anthony Michael Hall and Ally Sheedy work together. I'm very glad I watched, it is a great tv movie and Anthony and Ally did wonderful. Anthony in my opinion did a good job as a bad guy and you could tell he had fun doing it, although at first all I seen him as is Sweet Brian from Breakfast club so at times it was hard seeing him be mean to others and to Ally's character. So if this movie is ever on I recommend watching.

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!

This movie was probably the worst hijack movie I've ever seen.

Firstly the flight deck on the aircraft was too small and not how it would look in an actual aircraft.

The first officer wouldn't be flying the aircraft with his jacket on.

The captain and first officer didn't have any stripes on the shoulders of their shirts. They also didn't have their seat belts on during takeoff and landing.

Very sloppy movie. So unrealistic as far as the flight deck scenes go Surely these things could have been researched?

The rest of the movie was ok. I've seen better. The acting was mediocre, better than the movie itself lol.

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)