Air Force One:  death of the action movie

Wolfgang Petersen's Air Force One  is overwhelmingly a Hollywood movie: it hits all the right notes in all the right places and does exactly what it seems designed to do. It's also maybe the worst movie I've seen this year, entirely devoid of anything original, exciting, suspenseful, or interesting.

Featuring an impossibly mythic American President (played by the impossibly mythic Harrison Ford) singlehandedly taking on a band of Russian terrorists (so derivative is the movie that its creators couldn't even come up with a fresh batch of villains and resorted to the old Cold War standby of Evil Communists), Air Force One  plods along with dull insistence, taking us through whole set of action movie clichŽs we've seen before, and spitting us out at the end with the idea that somehow, through some sort of cinematic alchemy, this collection of recycled ideas, third-rate dialogue, and unimpressive stunts composes an actual movie. It doesn't cohere, of course, but it does, in its total artistic failure, say something about its genre, where it's been, and where it's most likely headed. Air Force One  is a sort of harbinger, and it seems to signal the death of the action movie.

What it all ultimately comes down to is the fact that there's no excitement left in action movies. None. I mean, come on - do we really think that Harrison Ford is going to get blown out of the plane during Air Force One?  Is there any doubt that Jason Patric will get sucked into the propeller blades in Speed 2: Cruise Control?  While it goes without saying that there's a certain formula to action movies (a formula, it seems, increasingly borrowed from video games, with their pyramidal structure of fighting increasingly tougher enemies until you get to the "end boss") and that a part of their appeal lies in their sense of inevitability, the degree to which action movies have become driven by formula - and the exclusion of anything even resembling kick or innovation - is pretty amazing.

In Air Force One, the President is faced with several wires to cut, one of which will dump the plane's fuel and force the terrorists to land, while another will blow up the plane's engine and kill him and everyone else on board. Is there really anybody who sits there in the dark, biting their fingernails in nervous anticipation about what's going to happen?

All of the action movies I've seen recently - even the good ones, like John Woo's Face/Off- have had this problem. There's just no tension, and hence no excitement, in watching what's already a predetermined outcome. Smart directors have managed to work around this by placing the focus of their films on things besides plot: the real fireworks in Face/Off  don't come from the explosions and gunplay - which, though impressive, mostly get in the way - but from the acting pyrotechnics of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta playing each other. The best action movies in recent years haven't really been action movies at all, but films where the action takes a back seat to something else: acting, comedy, whatever. Comedy is still fresh as a genre because the focus is on the jokes, and the plot, generally, is just a frame to hang them on. But with action movies it's pretty much guaranteed that, whatever's going on onscreen, we've seen it before.

Which I guess makes for a kind of metatextual experience in watching Air Force One  - what's onscreen is less about what's happening aboard the President's plane than what's happened in a thousand other action movies before -Ębut still a resoundingly unsatisfying one. The film might be unintentionally post-modern, but it still sucks. Action movies, Air Force One  being only the most recent and most depressing example, have become what the French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard called "simulacra": cultural entities that refer only to other cultural entities, with no real bearing on anything approaching reality. Air Force One  isn't really about the hijacking of the President's plane; it's about Speed,  and Die Hard,  and Cliffhanger. 

What makes Air Force One  worse than the abysmal Speed 2  is that Speed 2  feels like an enormous disaster, a $200-million mess gone way out of control - Air Force One  feels like a success. It's pretty clear watching Speed 2,  or Philip Noyce's jaw-droppingly, wonderfully bad The Saint,  that what hit the screen isn't what the filmmakers were hoping for. Films like Con Air  and Air Force One  (and what's with this thing about hijacked planes in danger? Why not just release Con Air Force One  and give it a rest?) are so pernicious because they seem to achieve exactly the desired effect, and exist in a kind of self-referential and closed-off system. There's no sense of fun in them, only a dogged commitment to tell the same story we've been told before; they're not movies, they're machines. You can't engage with Air Force One  like you can with Speed 2  - you can't even laugh at it. All you can do is sit in your seat and get run over by the machinery. Stefan Betz Bloom is a senior pop music director at WOBC and an English major.