It falls short of its main influence in that everything is played just a little too straight and the setting doesn’t give many opportunities for creative action scenes. The action is competent in a way a lot of action movies these days aren’t, in that you’re aware of the layout of the plane and the disposition of the fighters in every scene. The rest of the plot plays out with Ford tussling with hijackers, picking a few of them off as he secretly contacts Washington and schemes to get the plane on the ground or the passengers out of harm’s way. (Unlike Clinton, one of more than a dozen presidents who never served in uniform.) Fortunately (as one of his military brass reminds everyone in the White House situation room), Marshall is a helicopter pilot who’s served in combat. The president, unwilling to abandon his family, slips out of the pod before it’s jettisoned and becomes the lone passenger aboard the plane who hasn’t been captured by the hijackers.
When the Americans recover the presidential escape pod, he’s not there, either. We are assured by Marshall’s White House staff (in particular Dean Stockwell’s Secretary of Defense), that this would cause the complete collapse of the Russian government and a return to the Cold War.Īfter spraying automatic gunfire all over the interior of a pressurized cabin, Oldman’s hijackers take control of the plane, but there’s a hitch: The president supposedly already escaped.
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Oldman’s motivations are pretty easy to understand: He hates America, hates Gorbachev’s Russia and explicitly wants to use the hostages aboard Air Force One to force them to free the Kazakh dictator captured in the opening scene. The hijackers are led by Gary Oldman, in one of his classic unhinged villain roles. The punching and shooting starts after Air Force One is boarded by an unassuming crew of Russian journalists who turn out to be ultra-radical terrorists with an assist from an inside man (Xander Berkeley, whose turncoat Secret Service agent’s deeper motivations are never given so much as a word of explanation). We’re really here to see Ford, a guy defined by lovable rogues, employ his punching and shooting abilities while acting presidential. His comfort in the role is more notable than any of the movie’s action or plot, which, by virtue of Wolfgang Petersen directing, is matter-of-fact and competent on both those counts. Ford slides into the role like a Harvard graduate slides into a major party nomination. Marshall is the perfect president: Handsome, principled, multilingual, ready for a 3 A.M. Marshall’s audience loves it, his staff (who were not consulted on these talking points) hate it.
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Even as Air Force One was in theaters, the president the movie was transparently lionizing was on his way to being impeached and indirectly setting the country on a course for eight disastrous years of Republican rule.Īt a fete in his honor in Moscow, Marshall reflects on the inaction leading up to the maneuver and declares that American foreign policy is now to wreck all terrorists, a position that should evoke a tired sigh from anybody watching the movie with the benefit of hindsight that the subsequent quarter of a century has granted them. Coming as it did after Independence Day, which is another hyped up jingoistic blockbuster with exploding jets and a fightin’ prez, it was also the end of an era, and not just because action fans were about to be steamrolled by Matrix knockoffs, the first successful superhero blockbusters since Batman and every Lord of the Rings imitator. Clinton, who had won reelection in 1996, was just becoming embroiled in a sex scandal that would define the rest of his presidency.Īir Force One, a movie in which President Harrison Ford punches and machineguns radical commie terrorists and F-15s blow things up real good, is great fun to watch. But 1997, the year that gave the world Air Force One, was undoubtedly a time when they were at their absolute least sympathetic. Politicians have never been self-aware or relatable, ever. But it was still a high water mark for unbearability: Try to listen to a Mark Russell parody song or watch any Saturday Night Live cold open from 1993-2001 and see how long before you punch out the monitor. The only thing dumber than Clinton-era American politics has been, well, every subsequent era in American politics.
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