Review: Air Force One (1997)

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Air Force One

Rating

Director

Wolfgang Petersen

Screenplay

Andrew W. Marlowe

Length

2h 04m

Starring

Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, Glenn Close, Weny Crewsom, Liesel Matthews, Paul Guilfoyle, Xander Berkeley, William H. Macy, Dean Stockwell, Tom Everett, Jurgen Prochnow, Donna Bullock

MPAA Rating

Review

Air Force One is simply a vehicle for Harrison Ford, while it has its wonderful moments and quite a few of themre are several flaws with the film. For one, Gary Oldman acts completely subpar to his usual. I would for once like to see him play the part of a hero and not a villain, but this film doesn’t give you a lot of chances to hate him. Harrison Ford is also his usual self, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. He’s done quite a few better movies and all of them were not Action/Adventure films. The rest of the cast is there, but really doesn’t come into the foreground, except for a wonderful performance from Glenn Close as the Vice-President of the United States, by far the best performance in the film, she takes what she has and makes due with it.

The action itself is wonderful and its all seemingly realistic and acturate save for this annoying poor-quality shots and especially some terrible visual effects in the end. The sound, however, is quite superb, planes flying by, guns sounding film is truly a tribute to its sound persons. There is one disgustingly obvious goof in the movie, during one scene door to the conference room is shot with some rather large bullet holes. Later, when the door is opened and we look at it from outside, we notice that there are no holes in the door, yet later, when we look at the conference room from the outside holes are back.

The plot itself works miracles and would be believable on the most part. The film was enjoyable and suspenseful, but subpar to John Woo’s more stylistic Face/Off from earlier this year. Air Force One is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon, as long as you don’t mind nitpicking afterwards.