Now Boarding United 93: Needing consolation after takeoff is never a good sign.
The last Rambo or No Country for Old
Men as in-flight entertainment? Not gonna happen. Airplane! or United 93? Better bring your portable DVD player.
Here’s what won’t fly with airline censors: extreme violence, terrorism, hijacking, plane crashes, flight attendants behaving badly, nudity, sexual suggestiveness, offensive language, horror films, movies with controversial themes, or films that portray the U.S. in a bad light. Which basically leaves you with, oh, Enchanted and Bee Movie.
On American Airlines, “We won’t even show R-rated movies with edits,” says Jennifer Clark, AA’s program manager for in-flight entertainment. “Movies that are extremely political in nature or would
scare or make our customers uncomfortable are also avoided.”
No doubt this will also disqualify the new comedy Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, where the titular characters are mistaken for bomb-wielding terrorists and jailed after trying to light a bong on a flight to Amsterdam.
Giving special honorary mention to the Airport movies -- which started the whole disaster-in-the-sky genre -- and the aforementioned United 93, the last word in movies unsuitable for plane viewing, here are 10 movies we’d love to see on a plane… and never will.
10. PASSENGER 57
(1992)
What do you do if you’re the FBI and have to extradite a terrorist who’s also an explosives expert? Fly him on a commercial jet, of course -- and hope he amuses himself with episodes of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Yeah, right. In short order, the terrorist and his lethal mates (including a hilariously miscast Elizabeth Hurley) commandeer the plane, but they have an unexpected foe to reckon with: Passenger 57 (Wesley Snipes), a retired counterterrorism expert trying to live out his days as a low-level security consultant. What are the chances of that happening? About the same as seeing this violent Die Hard-on-a-plane flick in the main cabin.
9. EXECUTIVE
DECISION (1996)
Back in the ‘70s, hijacking meant diverting a plane to Cuba. Ah, the good old days. In this engrossing B-action movie set on a 747, Islamic terrorists plan to detonate a deadly nerve toxin bomb over Washington. How’d they get that bomb through the baggage screeners? Never you mind. Best scene: Steven Seagal sucked out of the back of a Stealth jet that’s attached itself to the hijacked
plane, leaving intelligence analyst Kurt Russell as the unlikely hero, aided by Halle Berry as the kind of gorgeous, resourceful flight attendant found only in Hollywood.
8. AIR FORCE ONE (1997)
Director Wolfgang Peterson gives the presidential jet the same claustrophobic treatment he gave a
World War II sub in Das Boot as Russian terrorists (led by a sadistic Gary Oldman) seize Air
Force One in mid-air with the president aboard. If this movie were made under the current Administration, viewers might well be cheering on the villains. But a decade ago, this was pre-9/11
wish fulfillment at its finest. Commander-in-Chiefs kicked ass in movies like this one and
Independence Day, and audiences went wild when the prez, played by Harrison Ford, snarled at
the bad guys to “get off my plane.”
7. TWILIGHT ZONE:THE MOVIE (1983)
John Landis, Steven Spielberg and Joe Dante directed remakes of classic stories from the Rod Serling TV series, but it’s the last segment, by Mad Max director George Miller, that earns this film its place in in-flight infamy. John Lithgow plays an anxious flyer who, during a stormy flight,
sees… a little green monster on the wing! Trying to wreck the engine! And no one believes him! As Lithgow takes matters into his own hands, it’s clear he’s crossed into another dimension…
6. CAST AWAY (2000)
This Oscar-nominated adventure pic -- starring Tom Hanks as a Fed Ex exec stranded on a deserted island -- might’ve made fine mid-air entertainment, except for how Hanks gets to the island in the first place: as the lone survivor of a plane crash (on a Fed Ex jet) depicted with such frightening realism, you’ll never again take overnight package delivery for granted.
5. FINAL
DESTINATION (2000)
A high school student (Devon Sawa) has a terrifying premonition of a plane exploding during takeoff. Haven’t we all had those? Except in this first scary installment of the successful franchise, the premonition comes true. Fortunately, by the time it does, Sawa and five of his classmates have been
thrown off at the gate. Unfortunately, they’re trapped in yet another horror film that dispatches teens in the most diabolical fashion. Released soon after the real-life crash of TWA Flight 800,
Final Destination deserves a special award for bad timing.
4. FEARLESS (1993)
An underrated Peter Weir film about a guy (Jeff Bridges) who survives a plane crash, and -- believing he’s cheated death -- feels so invincible, he can eat a bowl of strawberries (to which he’s
dangerously allergic) with no reaction. Bridges can’t seem to reconnect to his old life until he
meets a fellow crash survivor (Rosie Perez), who feels guilty that she couldn’t pull her baby out of the inferno. With its meditations on mortality and the fragility of life, Fearless is disturbing enough at sea level, let alone at 35,000 feet.
3. FLIGHTPLAN (2005)
Jodie Foster is in fine form as a recently widowed mom who falls asleep on a Berlin-New York flight and wakes up to find her six-year-old daughter missing. Kids, even badly behaved ones, don’t generally disappear while seven miles up in the air; and no one plays panicked parent better than Foster. But in this gripping Hitchcockian thriller, Mom gets one rude surprise after another --
including the revelation that, according to the flight crew, her kid was never on the flight to begin with. It’s enough to make any paranoid parent choose Amtrak.
2. ALIVE (1993)
Based on the true 1972 story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes Mountains, this is a film that’s unfit not only for in-flight viewing, but anywhere food is served. Ethan Hawke and Vincent Spano lead a group of young survivors who have to eat the remains of their fellow passengers in order to survive their ten-week ordeal. The crash sequence -- in which the wings and tail section are sheared off and two passengers are ejected into a snowy abyss below -- is spectacular.
1. SNAKES ON A PLANE (2006)
Has any movie better delivered on its title? In this campy fang-fest, FBI agent Samuel Jackson transports a murder witness from Hawaii to L.A.... unaware that the killer has hidden crates of venomous snakes in the cargo hold. Soon, the raging reptiles are venting their frustrations on terrified passengers, proving that snakes aren’t any happier about cramped legroom and confined quarters than we are. As the snakes slither under seats and into lavatories, mass hiss-tyeria ensues, and Jackson makes the most of a certain 13-letter expletive. Fangs down, it’s the film least likely to be shown
on an airplane.
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