TURBULENCE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(MGM) Starring: Ray Liotta, Lauren Holly, Hector Elizondo, Rachel Ticotin. Screenplay: Jonathan Brett. Producers: Martin Ransohoff, David Valdes. Director: Robert Butler. MPAA Rating: R (violence, strong profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 103 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
TURBULENCE is an interesting case of the kind of baby steps Hollywood takes when it comes to making women equal players in the movie business. Ten years ago, Sigourney Weaver proved in ALIENS that a woman could carry a large-scale action film; since then, things have gone from bad to worse for women in action films. With TURBULENCE we finally get an entry in the well-worn "terror in a confined space" genre which features a woman as the central protagonist -- not just as a ready-for-kidnapping love interest -- and she can't even get first billing ahead of Ray Liotta. Of course Lauren Holly is hardly a familiar face or name, which begs the question of why she received such a plum role. That is only one of the places TURBULENCE, a thriller with unique and sometimes compelling rhythms, misses its chance to be something special.
Holly stars as Teri Halloran, an airline flight attendant working a New York-to-Los Angeles Christmas eve flight with only a handful of passengers. Ordinarily that would mean a quiet and uneventful flight, except that two of the passengers are prisoners in federal custody, including convicted serial killer Ryan Weaver (Liotta). A charmer who protests that he was framed by an over-zealous cop (Hector Elizondo), Weaver begins to win Teri's trust, and appears to save the day when the other prisoners escapes and kills the federal marshals and the flight crew. With no one left to fly the plane to safety, and a massive storm ahead, Teri seems to be the only chance the surviving passengers have of getting to Los Angeles alive. That chance becomes a lot slimmer when Weaver shows his true colors, and decides that going down in flaming wreckage is more appealing that a long wait on death row.
The opening minutes of TURBULENCE make it clear that scripter Jonathan Brett and director Robert Butler are in full "cut to the chase" mode. Our knowledge of Teri as a character consists of the fact that her fiancee just dumped her, which in turn is infinitely more than we know about any other character on the plane. The five civilian passengers each get ten seconds of exposition before they are trundled off to a closet for the rest of the film, but it is just as well they were out of the way. TURBULENCE works best as a physical and psychological mano-a-mano between Teri and Weaver, with the 747 turning into a careening Winchester Mystery House of mysterious passageways. Butler gives much of the first half of TURBULENCE an effective tension; the atmosphere is surprisingly creepy, with lightning and Christmas tree lights turning the central confrontation between Teri and Weaver into something more unsettling than the pedestrian script could muster on its own.
Ray Liotta is an interesting villain through that scene, insisting on his innocence as he works at getting inside Teri's head. It is a casually seductive portrayal by Liotta, and sets up a scenario where the hero will have to outsmart the intelligent antagonist, since as a woman it is less likely that she will be able to overpower him physically. Unfortunately, we already know from the idiotically revelatory ad campaign not only that Weaver is in fact guilty as charged, but also that he is going to turn into a bug-eyed, tongue-waggling loon. Liotta tramples the mid-air scenery swigging champagne from the bottle, swinging an axe around, tossing off glib quips and generally doing his best audition for the role of the Joker if the BATMAN series decides to revive him and Nicholson is unavailable. So much for a battle of the minds.
It is a strange decision for many reasons, but primarily because the film spends so much time establishing how bright Teri is. Lauren Holly's performance doesn't contribute all that much to that perception; she's feisty enough, but she seems to be going through the motions when the script gives her a shot at Weaver, and it is hard not to be reminded of Julie Haggerty's thin-voiced flight attendant from AIRPLANE! when Holly has to struggle with the auto-pilot. No, Teri's smarts are revealed in a series of scenes in which a British pilot (Ben Cross) talks her through the landing process. Those scenes, far longer and more technical than you might expect, could have anxious action fans fidgeting in their seats, but the simple competence of Cross's tones give them a steady, gripping tempo. Rachel Ticotin is similarly strong in the similarly miniscule role of an air traffic controller, radiating the kind of intelligence the role of Teri really needs. In fact, if TURBULENCE was going to give us a female hero, it could have gone the extra step and given us one as strong as Ticotin. Go one step still further and make Cross the sly, seductive villain, and you really could have had something. TURBULENCE may be a better than average adrenaline shot, but it's still basically business as usual, even with no Arnold or Sly or Jean-Claude.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 plane figures: 6.
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