Hostage Flight

This 1985 made-for-TV suspense drama about Mideast terrorists who hijack a flight from New York to London, only to eventually find themselves at the mercy of the very people they've held hostage, seems now to be very much like the 1998 feature film THE SIEGE.

Truth tends to be stranger than fiction, but somehow, from what we know so far, there may have been HOSTAGE FLIGHT-type struggles for retaking control of the passenger jets that rammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. I have the uneasy feeling that this film, though it might have gone unnoticed but for its theme of hostages fighting back, may be quite prescient now.

The 1985 TV-Movie HOSTAGE FLIGHT is one of the better hijacking dramas, which includes theatrical features with the1970's All-Star-Cast device only here with actors and actresses mostly known for television, at that time...

Except Ned Beatty as the man in charge on the ground (with gunman Morgan Paull at his beckon call), stressing on the situation in the air, filmed with a worthy amount of suspense and for very good reason...

The eclectic hijackers are an extremely mean and nasty group, pulling off the kind of knee-jerking, loud and brash attitudes to not only get the passengers' respect... from stalwart pilot Mitchell Ryan to photographer Dee Wallace who's befriended blonde beauty Kim Johnston Ulrich.... but to effectively stir up the right amount of suspense for the anticipation of who they'll kill next...

And their genuine ferociousness is a surprise, played by actors looking soap operatic yet proving otherwise, making the viewers loathe their existence to the point where, during the final act twist when the passengers get the gun-hand, you may not feel the empathy intended as an ambiguous morality tale instead of an airplane-in-peril exploitation.