Skyjacked, based on a book by David Harper, is a fictional account of one of these events. The film stars Charlton Heston and a cast of notables including Roosevelt Grier, Yvette Mimieux, James Brolin, Walter Pigeon and Claude Akins. The film is a competent thriller that manages to maintain suspense throughout.
The film is broken into three acts. The first is a mystery. Someone has planted a bomb on a flight from Oakland to Minneapolis and left a message in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. The suspects are narrowed down to one of the first class passengers. The bomber orders the plane to be flown to Anchorage, Alaska.
Charlton Heston as the Captain has no choice but to divert the plane while they try to figure out who it might be.
In act two the bomber is revealed, but now the plane must try to land at Anchorage Airport in zero visibility. The plane must be talked down, while avoiding collisions with nearby aircraft.
And finally the third act. the bomber orders the plane flown to Moscow, where he plans to defect and turn over the plane and it's passengers, including a U.S. Senator (Walter Pigeon) and an FBI agent who was smuggled aboard at Anchorage.
The movie bogs down under a couple of unnecessary flashbacks that tell of a past romantic relationship between Heston and the head flight attendant, Mimieux. These scenes could have been left out completely and the script would be tighter and less campy. Also the script puts Heston in the role of hero at the end and it really does not work, since he has the opportunity to get off the plane and leave the madman to the Russians, but over all it is well made and holds together.
I saw this film with my mom at the North Masspaequa theatre in 1972. I enjoyed it then and it's still pretty good.
At the Movie House rating **1/2 stars
Next up was a different sort of hijacking film. This time it's Muslim terrorist who have smuggled a bomb filled with DZ-5 nerve gas on board a 747and plan to use a it as a weapon of mass destruction by crashing it into Washington. The film stars Kurt Russell as an intelligence analyst and Steven Segal as an assault team leader.
In Executive Decision an assault team is able to sneak on board the hijacked 747 in flight and it becomes a race against the clock to disarm the bomb and stop the terrorists before the President makes an "executive decision" to shoot the plane down, passengers and all. Oddly the President never appears in the movie.
A movie like this needs to have a few of things going for it, in order to work. First it must have a good bad guy. The film accomplishes that by having David Suchet as the lead terrorist. The guy is scary even when he plays a good guy. Second, it must give the audience something unexpected to keep the suspense up. The film does this by killing one of the films stars 20 minutes into the movie. If that can happen, than anything can happen. And finally, what ever goes on, no matter how preposterous, must have some level of credibility that allows the audience to suspend disbelief and go with the story. The film does this too, by using dialogue to make sure everything is explained along the way.
The films major failure is the over the top ending, with the hero in the cockpit trying to land the 747 and creating a standard Hollywood scene of explosions and fire. It was an unneeded climax to a very suspenseful film.
The film was a big budget hit back in 1996. Turning a 747 into a weapon of mass destruction was also used by Tom Clancy in his 1994 best seller, Debt Of Honor. In the aftermath of 9/11 both of these fictional stories take on a new light.
At the Movie House rating ***
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