By Geno McGahee
In the 1980s, the action movies usually featured a one-man force that would beat all the bad guys single-handily. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal made that style of film incredibly popular and enjoyable. In 1988, one film would change things for the badass action star. DIE HARD would be released and featured a vulnerable hero in Bruce Willis using strategy to defeat a group of bad guys. That film seemed to have been the stake in the heart of the one man army action films.
In 1995, Steven Seagal had his biggest hit with UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY. Despite the big numbers, the writing was on the wall that he had peaked. In 1996, Seagal would be used in an attempt to launch a new hero, a vulnerable hero, in Kurt Russell. Russell wasn’t a stranger to the genre, but he never really made a mark that separated him from the pack and made him a viable star. He co-starred in TANGO & CASH with Stallone and brought that normal guy turned tough guy in UNLAWFUL ENTRY, but he wasn’t a Seagal and that might have been the point. The 1990s was supposed to be more intelligent and Russell was the smart action star.
In action films, terrorists make for very good bad guys. They are usually from some other country, want to blow up things, and have a plan to kill a lot of Americans. In the 1996 “EXECUTIVE DECISION”, an evil terrorist, Hassan (David Suchet), has hijacked a plane and is carrying a bio-weapon set to unleash on the White House. David Grant (Russell) knows all about Hassan and teams up with Colonel Travis (Seagal) to take him down. The plan is to use a stealth plane to fly up to the plane and board it. Travis’s team, along with expert, Cahill (Oliver Platt) and Grant head up to make sure that the operation goes well. They hook up to the plane and board, but things go wrong and Travis is killed and the stealth plane breaks apart and crashes, leaving the rest of the team on the passenger plane. Yes, they killed off Seagal 20 minutes into the film.
On the plane, the group goes into motion and are looking for the bomb and to gain control of the situation before the government blows it out of the sky. Grant is a fish out of water with all of his work being Intel. He is much like the character that Nicolas Cage played in THE ROCK, and like Cage, he must grow into a leader and do things that he was not prepared to do to save the day.
One of the flight attendants, Jean (Halle Berry) begins helping Grant, while the other flight attendant just winces in every single scene. Marla Maples Trump played the role and I have a sneaking suspicion that her hubby at the time put down some money to get her a start in film. She gets a lot of face time for such a small role and every expression is the same as the last. She just winces. That is all.
Aboard the plane, Cahill tries to defuse the bomb as the team tries to take down the bad guys, leading to a last minute attempt to save the day and stop the jets from blowing them out of the sky.
EXECUTIVE DECISION has a great deal going for it. The cast is about as good as it gets. John Leguizamo, BD Wong, Oliver Platt and J.T. Walsh give great performances and their usual charm to this film. Kurt Russell does well as the vulnerable hero, but the film drags at times and pales in comparison to movies like DIE HARD and UNDER SIEGE. It’s worth a watch, but it was missing something.
Rating; 6.5/10
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