Maybe someone else can find something other than clichés in this movie but I couldn't. I generally enjoy airplanes-in-trouble movies. By their very nature they're pregnant with suspense and raise all sorts of questions, like, "What the hell are we doing up here at 37,000 feet???" This is the kind of movie that "Airplane" parodied 25 years ago, except that I'm not sure "Airplane" did a better job of sending up the genre than "Rough Air" does.
There's a scene in "Airplane," for instance, in which a trembling flight attendant confesses to another her fear that the airplane and everyone on it is doomed. Then she adds, "And also I'm twenty-six years old and not married yet," and breaks into sobs.
In this movie a cargo door blows out, decompressing the fuselage and taking part of the tail assembly off. The airplane is a wreck. It shudders and lurches and will never make Keraktovic, Iceland, or whatever it is. (It's not Reykyavik, and Shannon and Prestwick are portmanteaued into Shanwick.) The airplane is falling apart piece by piece. And two flight attendance are whispering together aft. One of them has had an affair with the pilot and smiles as she describes the experience. "I had hoped for a family. All the usual things. Then one day he just left. And that was all. It's over now. Of course he was -- great!" The other leans forward conspiratorially and asks, "Great?" They are about to die and they're discussing how good Eric Roberts is in bed.
Roberts is the co-pilot who has had to take over when the captain goes nuts, although Roberts himself is under a cloud for a previous pilot error. (He was really innocent.) Two of the braver passengers are in the luggage compartment trying to block the hole in the fuselage with heavy baggage. (Why? I don't know.) It's a dangerous job. They could be sucked out at any time as they struggled with the crates and trunks. One of them is a murderer being taken to prison. (All airplanes have handcuffed murderers aboard, accompanied by a cop who fails in his duty.) In the midst of their exertions, the other passenger asks why the criminal did it. The two of them must shout over the howling slipstream and screaming jet engines. Still, the murder stops hustling the baggage and explains his motives. "He stole everything from me. My wife. My money. My life. I felt all empty inside." He completes the dangerous task, which will help save the airplane, and is sucked out to answer to a higher authority.
There's also one of those passengers who carries a lot of authority, some kind of high muckamuck in Global Circumcisional Airlines or something, and he makes a pain out of himself, bullying other, demanding to know what's going on, and generally getting in the way of things.
I missed the kid, though. I mean the child that's always on these stricken aircraft. Sometimes they need a kidney transplant. Sometimes a rare type of blood transfusion. Sometimes they suffer from peanut allergies. But they're always sick. I missed the kid.
Maybe that's why this movie is so unsatisfying. I burst into a torrent of tears when I heard the flight attendant say that it was all over between her and the pilot. (This was just before she told the joke about the difference between a stewardess and a jet engine.) I wept abjectly when the murderer poured out his tale of woe. But I could have flooded with tears this abandoned railway car that I live in -- if only that sick kid could have been aboard and have her life saved.
I'm -- I'm sorry. I can't go on. I'm choked with an unidentifiable but overwhelming emotion the chief symptom of which is nausea.
