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Pretty lame excuse for a thriller. This is one of those films where you spot fake accents, spot continuity gaffes and watch bad acting and corny lines. Working like Bruckheimer with no money, Air Marshal struggles to do too much with too little. The real question is, why do low-budget filmmakers try to make huge action pictures that they can't possibly afford the effects and actors for? Why not make a talking heads movie with ideas and art involved? I guess that would be asking too much.

This will never open in theaters, so go to a video store and dig around in a few years, you'll find it there.

Echoing the more caustic remarks of the other reviewers, but on a single point; the first scene in the film is a title to give us the setting: "Lybia." Wrong! (It could be worse. Later they could have spelled Europe, "Eupore.")

Going to the next scene, we see a Lt. Col. in front of a map showing locations and on which to map progress: "Libya." So glaring accuracy errors pointed out by other posters aside, even the most uninitiated in military matters or warfare will see that a major faux pas is committed in the first five minutes of the film. Oh well, I got the used DVD for $3, so I don't have a lot invested. I am just hoping as I view it now, that I can overlook the errors of the other posters and get $3 in value from it.

If you like fake Hollywood cookie-cutter movies, this is the film to beat. Despite being overtly explicit with its support of racial profiling and portraying Muslim Arabs as terrorists and big hunky white guys as heroes, the plot line is overly-predictable and the characters shallow and annoying. The acting isn't bad, nothing too amateurish though. Certainly written in the post 9-11 heyday, continuing the Hollywood stance of marginalizing targeted branded minorities of the sorts done in Air Force One and True Lies. Also, the camera shakes throughout the movie, simulating the plane flying through air - gets annoying.

AIR MARSHAL is one of those movies that not only insults your intelligence, but it dares you to care. Not only does the screenplay play on 9/11, even having a character use the line "Let's roll", but I have not seen this much plot contrivances in a long, long time. Truly an awful movie, only saved (if you can call it that) by its audacity to be exploitative, stupid, and at the same time, convoluted up to a point where you just have to shake your head in dismay.

And would someone please tell B-movie filmmakers to stop using cheap-looking CGI models? If they can't afford actual props, shouldn't they steer their screenplays AWAY from films that requires them?

There are bad movies and then there are bad movies. AIR MARSHAL is just...bad.

2 out of 10

(go to www.nixflix.com for a more detailed review of this film)

Others have already pointed to the stereotypes in connection with 9/11. I will focus on tech details of the aircraft. An American crew that operates a simulated (Russian) Tupolev 134 with a Bulgarian registration! They even had an elevator in the plane to make the audience believe this was a 747. The designer of the cockpit must have been either delirious or suffer from another major psychiatric disorder. That also goes for the special effects people. The airplane movements were totally unrealistic and probably the result of a doped flight simulator sequence. The film was aired by a commercial TV-station. It was enough to switch off after 10 minutes. It couldn't be more incredible.