Airboss

Rating

Director

J. Christian Ingvordsen

Screenplay

J. Christian Ingvordsen, Michael M. Howe

Length

1h 30m

Starring

Frank Zagarino, Kayle Watson, John Christian, Bleu Deen, Glenn Schuld

MPAA Rating

PG-13

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
There are two schools of thinking in terrorist relations. One is to take out the threat by any means necessary. The other is to capture and interrogate the bad guys in an effort to discover more terrorists. Airboss tries to balance these philosophies in a slip-shod action-adventure film.

Frank Zagarino is Frank White, a U.S. Air Force pilot who must lead a joint FBI-military team to bring down various terrorist threats. He’s joined by Bone Conn (Kayle Watson) a temperamental Navy Seal who prefers to kill the enemy, not capture it. His romantic foil is FBI agent Morgan Daniels ( Caroline Strong). Also involved is Agent William Murphy (Jerry Kokich). This makes up the team until the latter half of the film, when special operation commander Webb Buckley (played by director J. Christian Ingvordsen) joins the team.

Their first task is to bring in a terrorist who’s hijacked a Russian sub and taken weapons-grade plutonium into his control. Then they move on to removing a Middle Eastern terrorist organization and its leader. On top of al this, they must train side-by-side, bicker and argue their way into each other’s hearts.

The main problem with the film is its severe lack of acting talent. It’s embarrassing enough to have bit players and stock characters with little to no talent, but when bad performances bleed into the leading roles, there’s a significant problem. Kokich and Zagarino are the only two that show the remotest hints of talent. The latter is effective in his position as father figure and leader of the group. The former makes her character modestly interesting, with small amounts of charm.

Ingvordsen is virtually unnecessary and unnoticeable while Watson and Strong attempt to play off of one another without paying attention to where the other actor is going. Watson plays an arrogant, sexist pig and Strong plays the catty, macho feminist. Both are throwaway characters and throwaway performances. Every film of this sort must involve a romantic liaison and usually it develops between two people who can’t stand one another. Sure enough…

Airboss doesn’t disappoint in the cliché department. The humourless plot is every bit as terrible as the acting. Writer/director Ingvordsen feels it necessary to slow down the film every 20 minutes to interject a useless bit of character repartee. This makes an extremely short film seem longer than it should.

Sure, some folks will enjoy this type of film because of its unthinking appeal. However, most will see the film as a pedestrian, escapist flick with few redeeming qualities and a complete lack of cerebral context.

Review Written

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