EXECUTIVE DECISION
A film review by Jane Taylor
Copyright 1996 USPAN
this review is also posted at http://moviereviews.com/janesreviews/executivedecision.html
***1/2 (out of 4)
I could pick this movie apart for a lot of movie critic type reasons, but the fact is, I was on the edge of my seat for two hours and twenty minutes. Wholly unbelievable situations and hokey, ride-off-into-the-sunset-with-the-girl-Pentagon-be-damned endings are no match on the ratings scale for fingernails bitten down to the quick.
Kurt Russell plays a U.S. Government intelligence expert who's spent years on the tail of a member of the Chechan mafia. Does it seem to anyone else that the Sicilian mafia is passe' in favor of other more exotic third world crime organizations? It's as if the darn Gottis and Gambinos are very 80s and slightly tacky, like vacationing on the French Riviera, as opposed to the rain forests of Costa Rica.
Anyway, this pesky Muslim zealot engineers the abduction and delivery into American hands of a middle eastern terrorist so that he and his men can hijack a plane and demand the terrorist's release, giving them an excuse to fly into the airspace over Washington DC and blow up the plane (and themselves, and a substantial portion of the Eastern Seaboard) in the name of Allah.
Got that? Me neither. That's okay, because the details of the plot are really secondary to the nifty details of getting a U.S. Army commando squad on board this plane, undetected, while it's inflight and watching them outsmart the hijackers. Oh, and did I mention that during the transfer from the stealth plane to the commercial 747, they manage to lose most of their sophisticated surveillance gear (and their commander, Steven Segal, in the shortest role of his career) and have to resort to paper clips and chewing gum and good old American ingenuity?
You'll gasp at the high wire acrobatics over the passenger cabin! You'll hold your breath as the plucky flight attendant (the beautiful and totally wasted Halle Berry and her even more superfluous companion, Marla Maples Trump) hides Russell's presence in the galley elevator from the terrorists. And you'll cheer and howl at the old fashioned way that this high tech squad of commandos finds to notify the Pentagon that they are on board and that they have matters in hand.
What a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon!
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