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| Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup | | Rating: 4
| Aircraft silhouetted against an afternoon sky. The music on the soundtrack surges; the actors grow into terse, tense expressions. A dangerous mid-air transfer is about to happen onto an endangered 747. Could it be Charleton Heston, about to be lowered into a cockpit to rescue Karen Black? No! It's never-aging Kurt Russell and a team of commandos raiding a hostage-held jetliner that's armed with nerve gas for use on a suicide mission. Wohoo! The disaster film lives!
Twenty-one years since AIRPORT '75 and the formula still works wonders, though with a few necessary changes: instead of a mid-air collision causing problems, it's Middle-Eastern terrorists; instead of Gloria Swanson on board, the biggest name on the passenger list is Marla Maples Trump. (She has a cameo as a stewardess.) The expected emergency landing stays, but they've added an entire DIE HARD subplot that has Russell and his crack commandos methodically plotting a takeover. All that's missing is George Kennedy's cigar!
EXECUTIVE DECISION is shameless fun from producer Joel Silver and editor-turned-director Stuart Baird. The Jim and John Thompson (PREDATOR, PREDATOR 2) script steals from everywhere-- AIRPORT, FAIL SAFE, SPEED-- and, once it gets airborne, the darn thing works wonders. The attention to casting detail is particularly good: J.T. Walsh as a worried Senator on board, Steven Seagal as the squinty commando leader, Halle Berry as the stalwart stewardess. And the list of good players goes on: Joe Morton, Oliver Platt, John Leguizamo. No particular character is written *that* well, but they gel into one of the better action ensembles that we've seen in some time. Recommended.
By : Michael J. Legeros
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| | Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup | | Rating: 3
| For those action film fans who think that Steven Seagal is indestructible, I highly recommend you see EXECUTIVE DECISION, a cheese-o-rama of an action flick that gives Seagal *seventh* billing and a quick ride to Action Hero Heaven.
No, this is *not* a "Steven Seagal Movie." It's a "Kurt Russell Movie"--the New Kurt Russell, the tough-yet-vulnerable Kurt Russell, the Kurt Russell a la Bruce Willis-type with whom we're about to be deluged, like it or not (answer: probably not).
The story of EXECUTIVE DECISION is easy to boil down: another rehashing of DIE HARD, on an airplane for the first time since PASSENGER 57. This outing, Seagal, Russell, John Leguizamo, and Oliver Platt head a team of scrappy commandos and less-warlike people who board a 747 in mid-flight to stop a nerve gas bomb from detonating over Washington and wiping out the Eastern seaboard. This, apparently, is what terrorists do for kicks.
It could've been fun. It's been done, yes, but a fresh take on the hostage story can be exciting, and at times, EXECUTIVE DECISION is edge-of-your-seat material. The problem, and it shouldn't exist, is that for the entire first *hour* of this film, it is the most hideously boring, lifeless, repetitive, derivative, and pointless bit of celluloid you can imagine. Clocking in at a whopping 2 hours, 20 minutes, this picture had *plenty* which could have been cut out but wasn't, resulting in a whole lot of catching up to do in the last hour.
Thank God that the catch-up is pretty fun--but still, putting the audience to sleep at the beginning of the movie is a violation of the cardinal rule of action filmmaking.
If you're wondering about the acting, dialogue, etc.--don't. They're all typically cheese-infested (Seagal's character is actually, and I am not making this up, named "Austin Travis"). Instead, if you go to EXECUTIVE DECISION, sit back and try to enjoy the explosions and high-tech gadgetry. But more importantly, try to get there late.
By : Christopher Null
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